


Devouring Time and Changeful Chance

by AgarthanGuide, akathecentimetre



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: AU, Artists and Muses, Cold War, F/M, Football, Gen, John le Carré - Freeform, M/M, New York Shitty, Soccer, Spies, history what history, pirates!, ships and shit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-16
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-01-19 16:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1476349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgarthanGuide/pseuds/AgarthanGuide, https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of AU fics (i.e. out-of-control behemoths). Featuring art by JakartaInn. SEE CHAPTERS FOR PAIRINGS AND WARNINGS.</p><p>1: Pirates! An overlong origin story featuring scars, tattoos, a swivel cannon named Balizarde, and Margot the ship’s cat in the Caribbean, 1754-1760.<br/>2: A ‘Cold War’ AU, inspired by a kink meme prompt and crossing over heavily with the world of John le Carré’s <i>Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.</i><br/>3: Artist!Athos AU - it starts with Porthos being concerned for the mystery man who lives in the apartment above the restaurant; it ends with a Banksy in Brooklyn, a feisty gallery owner and her much-younger boyfriend, a show called MUSE, and Aramis all caught up in it all the way through. Slash, Athos/Aramis; Constance/d'Artagnan, Porthos The Best Friend Ever. <b>Warnings:</b> drug and alcohol abuse, undercurrents of abusive relationships.<br/>4: Football/Soccer AU, featuring keeper!Porthos, Athos dragging himself back into fitness goal by goal, d'Artagnan and an entire team of Feisty Badass Women, and Aramis the eternal tease. <b>Warnings:</b> alcohol abuse, sports injuries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lodestar of My Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This – got away from me a bit. I started out thinking ‘Yum, pirates!’ and now, 13,775 words later, I’m really not sure what I have here. (What there definitely _is_ is amazing art by JakartaInn, which kept me going as the fic grew and grew!) Those who have read some of my other fics will know that I tend to work in bits of Real History whenever I can; this exists in a sort of in-between world where the framework is the Seven Year’s War, but a lot of pirate mythology (democratic votes, marooning, hangings, duels) that will be familiar to fans of Errol Flynn or _Pirates of the Caribbean_ also shows up. It’s a lot angstier and a lot more violent than I had anticipated and mixes up elements of the show in all sorts of weird ways, too, so – I dunno! This is also a fill of sorts for [the kink meme prompt which first inspired it](http://bbcmusketeerskink.dreamwidth.org/774.html?thread=921606#cmt921606) (god only knows what the OP will think). I hope you enjoy it, at any rate!

*

Porthos had the boy by the scruff of the neck, and was peering at him as though he was a particularly spiky sort of sea urchin.

“Don’t like the look of him,” the big man grunted eventually, as the boy – who, Aramis was sure, had to have a name of some sort, but given as he was likely to be thrown overboard at any moment, it didn’t seem important – squirmed and kicked ineffectually at Porthos’s shins, his face slowly turning purple. “What d’you say we do with him, Captain?”

“I frankly don’t care,” Athos drawled behind Aramis – he turned to see that Athos had gotten up from the deck to which he’d been hurled and wiped his bleeding lip on his sleeve, which, also being red (it had seen better days, but there was still something vaguely regal about it), meant the blood just left yet another somewhat-darker stain. “Though I’d rather like to know what the hell he thinks he’s talking about.”

“You killed my father!” the boy rasped, now batting – just as uselessly – at the enormous abominations Porthos called his hands, clutching at knuckles inked with anchors and scraps of creole. “I’ll kill you, pirate!”

“Goodness,” Athos said, and put an arm around Aramis’s shoulders, leaning in, with a conspiratorial spark in his eyes. “A pirate killed his father, Aramis. Should we be honored that we are apparently the representatives of this entire hell-bound race of knaves?”

Porthos laughed, belly-deep, and Aramis couldn’t help a grin breaking across his face. The boy squeaked, and, as Porthos’s hand opened, fell to the deck in a heap of tangled, gangly limbs.

“The – the captain I spoke to on St. Croix,” the boy choked, rubbing at his neck as he edged away from Porthos, eyes still fixed on Athos. If he hadn’t been so concerned for Athos’s welfare – and he was, because the boy’s sword was well-made and visibly well-used – Aramis would almost have felt sorry for him. “He told me he saw a ship with these lines attack my father’s – ”

“Which captain was this, exactly?” Porthos growled, taking a menacing step forward. 

“Called himself the Savoyard – ”

Aramis was glad, suddenly, for the fact that they were in port; that the crew was therefore on shore; that there was the promise of firm, unmoving ground for him to step onto if he needed it; that he could feel Athos next to him, feel the sudden press of Athos’s hand at the base of his spine; that they were both alive.

Unfortunately, _that_ man was still alive, too, and the stakes, it seemed – as Athos held out a hand to the boy and the boy, scowling and suspicious, took it and allowed himself to be hauled back up onto his feet – had definitely been raised.

“Come have a drink,” Athos said shortly, and turned to go below decks, clearly expecting to be followed. “You have a lot of explaining to do.”

*

[](http://i.imgur.com/2lDujG6.jpg)  
"Silver" by [JakartaInn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn). Click for full-size.

*

Aramis had deserted from the Royal Navy in 1754. He hadn't planned for it to happen, exactly – in fact, in retrospect, he sensed that it had been a process that had taken some years, that slow disillusionment with the constant discipline, the endless roaming in search of the French, or whoever the hell it was that they were supposed to find – the War of Jenkins’ Ear had claimed too many participants to count, far too quickly – and the cold, the bitter cold of the northern Atlantic, somehow so ill-suited to his temperament despite him having not ever known anything other than England's coastal rainstorms.

1754 had started well for him, however - he had been promoted from Able Seaman to Surgeon's Mate, and, it seemed, had found himself a vocation. He found it horrifying at the start, and had vomited under the watchful – and impatient – eyes of the surgeon during his first amputation, his first attempt at cutting out splinters from skin (cut out because they could not be drawn out the way they came, for fear of barbs and shards digging deeper). But there was something fascinating about it – something powerful, that quickness of his learning hands to contain life in the fragile shells of men which came to him mangled beyond recognition. He learned how to cauterize with hot irons, how to sew muscles back together (his reputation in this regard got him the assignment of stitching every single bloody ripped sail from then on), how to wield the dreadful saw; he also realized, at some point, when he accompanied the doctor onto shore at Anguilla, blinking and luxuriating like a bear emerging from hibernation in the sun and intense heat of the Caribbean, that he wanted something more.

Deserting was easier than he anticipated, in the end. He had found a tavern – a decent establishment, relative to the rest – batted a few eyelashes at the very lovely girl behind the bar, and spent the three days the colonial garrison took to look for him in a variety of very interesting positions in her bed. She brought him clothes, eventually – tough leather boots, slimming breeches, and a grey shirt which may have seen better days, but his needle would soon put that right – and, in a brief fit of nostalgia, he discarded his short jacket but not his blue waistcoat, turning the gold buttons gently between his fingers and thanking his lucky stars that he had managed to maintain his looks through his many years at sea, to keep his teeth white and his back unbowed.

"You a decent shot?" the girl had asked, as he'd admired himself – sort of – in the dirty mirror she kept tucked away in her room above the bar ("For the days," she had said, "when I feel pretty."). "There's always pirates who're looking for a dependable man with his own pistols. And if you can do some doctorin', they'll definitely want ya."

Pistols, then, had been the next step, and he'd spent what remained of the pay he'd stolen away with him on what might have been the finest pair of guns he'd ever seen, inlaid with silver - an expense he considered justified less than a week later, when, sitting sprawled at the back of the tavern with a glass of very fine rum indeed in his hand, a pair of slim female legs – wearing breeches, however – hoved into view, and he looked up to see one of the most beautiful women he'd ever encountered or would ever hope to, whose gaze was fixed tantalizingly close to his midriff.

"Like what you see?"

"Mm," she said, settling against the edge of his table, arms crossed over her green corset; she had a dagger at each hip, flowing white sleeves, and the chain of a silver locket snaking up under her dark hair. "The pistols. Must have cost you a pretty penny."

"They did. But there's more treasure to be had," he grinned, leaning back so she could enjoy the view.

"I happen to be a married woman," she said, sounding nothing more than sincerely bored. "I'm more interested in your aim."

"Always true."

"Really."

Aramis had thought fast; weighed the options, and thought that whatever she had to offer, it was worth taking for the mere chance of looking at her some more. The fact of the husband wouldn't rob him of that pleasure, surely. "I'm a surgeon," he said, and thanked his tavern-girl's perception as the woman's eyebrows rose sharply. "I come with my own tools."

"Sold," she said instantly, and stood upright, beckoning for him to do the same. "Follow me."

He scrambled to gather himself and his bag, and stepped out into the sweltering May heat to find her already walking her sharp, determined way towards not the docks, but in entirely the opposite direction, where, he knew, the town would peter out into jungle, and then small paths would lead towards harbors and coves that may have been mapped, but certainly not frequented. "I'm Aramis," he said, as he finally fell into step beside her.

"Anne. De la Fère."

"Your husband's name?”

"Indeed." She turned and smiled at him as they walked, full lips and gap-toothed smile making him swallow hard. "He's the finest swordsman in the Caribbean."

"I'm sure," Aramis murmured. 

The ship – his first pirate ship – was nothing special, just a two-masted schooner with patches on the sails and flakes of paint falling into the water from the hull, possible to be crewed by twenty but with more than fifty packed beneath the decks and hanging exhausted in the rigging in the stiff heat. They were good lads, though, the ones he met on that first day, a bewildering mix – to Aramis, who had spent his whole career in the rigid confines of the Admiralty – of Europeans on the run from much the same restrictions as he, Africans on the run from everything, Spanish mestizos; men, children, and more than a few women, some of whom worked in the galley and others who, like Anne, wore breeches, pistols and knives. They were formidable, thrillingly so, but none more so than Anne herself – who, as she had said, did indeed come with a husband, and a brother-in-law, who frightened Aramis immensely. 

It would have been enough to be impressed by Athos's skill with a blade, or his bearing, or his air of command; or, indeed, the way he carried himself, alternately slouched in motionlessness and then suddenly upright and alert to danger or even mere curiosity; or the sharp look that came into his eyes when he saw Aramis, the desire in them when he saw Anne approach. The sight of all of them put together, in the person of one man whom most of the crew – judging by the fierce respect inherent in their every word and move towards him – would die for, frightened Aramis, reminded him of the rumors that would spread within his familiar naval fleets about the sort of captains whose men swore to blood and hellfire, who sailed fast and turned into the wind without hesitation if it meant they would get a better chance at a broadside. It didn't make much sense, Aramis thought several days later, as he settled into his routine of taking care of scrapes and cuts and helped with scouring the decks clear of the threat of rot, that Athos wasn't captain – he seemed content, however, to maintain his place as first mate under said captain, a somewhat gibbering middle-aged former merchant named Louis, and save his strength for slipping away onto shore with his wife in the evenings, and practicing his swordplay in mock duels up and down the foredeck with his brother, Thomas, in which Aramis got the distinct impression he was toying with the younger man as a cat would with a mouse.

In his first week on board, which they spent at anchor, re-supplying diminished stocks of hard biscuit, water, and cured meat, Aramis only once had cause to speak to Athos, and it did nothing to disperse his trepidation. Thomas had, through sheer luck, landed a blow across the back of Athos's hand hard enough to split two knuckles; Aramis was silent as he cleaned and wrapped the wound, keenly aware of the sweat edging its way down the inside of Athos's wrist.

"You're staring," Athos said, and Aramis glanced upwards to see Athos looking at him with something that, for him – the slightest upturn at the corner of his mouth – probably indicated amusement.

Aramis shrugged, and turned to pick up a knife so he could trim the edge of the cloth bandage. "It's quite a sight, your sparring. I'm surprised Thomas was able to touch you."

"He shouldn't have. He didn't control the blade properly," Athos said, his tone echoing that of Anne's, back at the tavern – there was something there that was not quite world-weariness, for there was too much impatience in it. "You're good at this," he added, carefully examining the layers of salve and cloth across his palm. "Navy?"

"Ex-navy."

"Well," Athos said, and held out his other hand; Aramis was surprised to suddenly sense something of a warmth in him, a moment of relaxation, and perhaps this time, the smile was genuine. "Welcome. We're weighing anchor tomorrow."

Aramis took the proffered hand, shook it firmly, and made sure to convey that he, too, considered himself a man of substance.

They did indeed leave Anguilla the next day, and, according to the quick word-of-mouth among the crew, were bound for Guadeloupe. Aramis had been itching for it – the smell of wind catching in sails, of tar and clean sand on the decks, of the sound of singing ropes – and stayed on deck as much as he could in those two first precious days of the voyage, being laughed at by Anne and not caring a whit. It was on the third day that they saw their first action – it was nothing new to Aramis, of course, the thrill of anticipation and the readying of weapons, but here he didn't feel the pressure of discipline as they eagerly hung over the bulwarks screaming blasphemous abuse at the hapless merchant ship as they approached; he was not afraid of what they would find on board as several men threw themselves joyfully from the rigging and swung down into the little crowd of cowering seamen armed with not much more than the cutlery they were carrying to market. Aramis went down below decks to explore, shivering with adrenaline, and found Athos checking through the foodstuffs, sticking a hand into one of the hemp sacks and, with a lick of his spice-covered finger, turning to Aramis with a triumphant grin. The sugar alone, once safely sold on the captain's favored island of St. Thomas, would keep them in stores for a month.

And so it continued, until the first hurricanes of autumn started to scream through the islands and Aramis learned of a new kind of terror, one which dwarfed the threat of any storm he had experienced in his years in the English Channel and the North Sea. They retreated to safe harbors when they could, outrunning black skies heavy with lightning; once, though, they were caught right in the middle of it, and Aramis was seasick for the first time in his life, battened down below the decks in piles of heaving bodies bruised from being thrown against the hull, frantically stopping up holes and guarding with their lives the remaining unbroken barrels of fresh water. He went up onto the deck once, to help pull to safety a crewmember who had fallen from the rigging in the communal effort to take in sail, and was spitting blood; he stumbled into Athos in the chaos, and he remembered clutching at the other man, just to feel grounded, fingers digging into sodden cloth as Athos shouted at him to get back below, his words snatched away by the wind. They limped back to St. Thomas, finally, two days after the storm passed on, and needed nearly a month to get the ship seaworthy again, by which point the weather had started to turn towards something vaguely approaching winter – for the Caribbean – and most of the crew had drifted off to other opportunities, leaving their places to be filled with strangers, which bothered Aramis without him knowing exactly why.

They met other pirate vessels only infrequently in those months; it was hard, Aramis had learned, even to tell who was a legitimate pirate and thief, in fact, because the war raging across the Atlantic had turned British, French, and American vessels alike – and some Dutch, of course, because the Dutch were everywhere - into privateers either in practice or in name, and every ship they spotted or stole from could have been carrying their goods either by legal or illegal means. After a while, he stopped caring who it was they attacked; but in November, he heard for the first time about another captain who was a force to be reckoned with, and, as he sat drinking one evening with Athos, Anne, and Thomas – all of whom, he was startled to realize, he could now count as friends, of a sort – he heard about the Savoyard, a captain whose ruthlessness had attracted the worried concern of navy and other pirates alike, who preferred to massacre crews and burn their ships rather than do the decent thing and be peacefully on his way with his spoils; and, rather more worryingly, had been seen near Barbados, where they were moored, and was supposedly on the hunt for fresh meat.

"There's nothing to worry about," Athos had said, calm as ever, a bottle of looted brandy in his hand and his head laid in Anne's lap; she stroked his eyelids closed, and winked at Aramis through her hair at the soft look Aramis knew was on his face. "He's got a brig, true, but she's a slow bitch of a ship. We'd outrun her before he could fire a shot. And that's if he even cares about us, which he has no reason to."

The next morning was cold, and mist had rolled in across their harbor; the sun stayed weak in the sky and didn't burn off the fog, and then, close to noon, the prow of a black-sailed ship loomed suddenly around the headland and its cannons opened fire. Ten men, at least, fell killed or wounded before the rest of them were even awake, and several more before the first men, Athos and Thomas at their head, started clambering frantically up into the foremast to loose the sails; Aramis abandoned the wounded and helped lay his shoulders to the capstan to bring up the anchor, all of them screaming and cursing as the brig, with the Savoyard standing on her deck somewhere among the smoke, ordered the second broadside. Every shot found a mark, ripping through sail, wood and bone; above him Aramis heard screams which indicated falls from the rigging, but despite the chaos it seemed they'd done enough - the sails found what little wind there was, and below him there was the rhythm of buckets hoisting water up out of the hold as they started to slip away. 

He dashed sweat and blood out of his eyes, ran to the nearest body, turned it over, found no hope – as he ran to the next one, he felt the ship shift and creak in the water as the wind strengthened, and they crossed across the bow of the Savoyard, heading towards open water. Athos had been right; she was a hulking beast of a vessel, heavily armed but totally outmatched for speed, and even with Louis's over-nervous guidance at the helm they would easily outrun her. And it would have been easy – but for the fact that they had been shot at from the Savoyard's starboard side, and then, as they swept past him, he could fire his readied guns from the port side, and he did.

Aramis woke hours later to the thud of pain in his head and crusted blood on his temple. He was below decks, he could tell from the darkness, and laid between others – as he slowly levered himself up on one hand, he could see how many of his fellow victims there were, and it was appalling. Several lay in hammocks, already stitched closed and ready for a sea burial; others lay groaning and bloody, writhing against internal injuries or all-too-obvious, stinking external ones. Aramis shook his head to clear it and tried to stand, and realized as he did that the ship felt surprisingly sound – he could tell from what dim light was coming through the portholes that she was moving at a fine clip, and presumably safe. 

His boot caught on something, and he looked down to find his footing – and stopped dead, because the face looking up at him – or what was left of it, anyway – was, or had been, Thomas. And then he heard a commotion sweeping along the deck above, shouting and screaming and profane accusations, and he gathered himself as quickly as he could, forgetting all about the charges he should ostensibly have been treating in his hurry to get up into the fresh air and see what was going on.

“ _Really, Athos, you must admit that this looks very bad, very bad indeed_ – _”_

_“If you don’t take your hands off her I swear to God I will shoot, and you **know** I will – ”_

Louis sounded terrified, and as Aramis lurched up onto the deck it was not difficult to see why, because Athos as pale as he was, shaking with grief, would have been worrying enough – holding a pistol out as he was then, pointed straight at the men who held a squirming, shrieking Anne in their grip, was far worse.

“What’s happened?” Aramis said as sharply as he could muster, making his way carefully over to Louis, who was wringing his hands with distress.

“Bitch sold us out,” one of the men holding Anne said, and she screamed again as one of them pressed a dagger into his side. “Remy saw her, didn’t you, Remy? Saw her speaking to his first mate in port yesterday. He knew we’d be there because she told him!”

“I’d never stoop so low as to take the bother to betray worms like you,” she hissed, and a shiver ran through Aramis as Athos staggered and the pistol fell from his grip, because everyone knew, huddled there on the blasted deck, that that was not what he had expected to hear, what he had needed to hear. Terror flashed suddenly across Anne’s face as she realized her mistake, and her eyes opened wide as she began to beg.

“Please, Athos. I didn’t mean for – he wasn’t meant to fire – ”

“Oh, God,” Athos groaned, and Aramis hurried to his side, tried to hold him upright as he doubled over.

The pirate in charge of the mob grunted, and turned to the crew. “All in favor,” he said, with a jerk of his head at the water, so that everyone knew exactly what he was asking them to vote for. “Hands up.”

Aramis, with one arm around Athos’s shoulder, raised his hand, and joined the others to a man, because he knew they were all raw with pain and sleeplessness, and even if he hadn’t believed Anne had earned her fate, it would be dangerous to dissent. Louis, eyes shifting rapidly in his face, was nodding weakly.

Athos’s hand rose from his side, a few inches at most, and fell again; and Anne started to scream in earnest.

Aramis pulled Athos down below decks, took him away from the sight and sound of Anne being gagged, of her hands being tied behind her back and a heavy lead shot wrapped around her feet. Athos went unresisting, every muscle slack with shock, and completely unaware of Aramis’s attempts to clean the blood from his shirt – Thomas’s blood, perhaps – as he folded him into his bed in the makeshift surgery. The distant splash, when it came, shut Athos down completely, leaving him silent and unmoving; Aramis locked him in and kept the key, his heart hammering with fear.

Two days later, as the crew sat tense and quiet through their continued trip back to port to make repairs, the crisis came – and Aramis, it turned out, had unwittingly played no small part in it, because when Athos broke down the door and charged up on deck it was clear that he had consumed the entire store of alcohol and laudanum in the surgery which Aramis used to dull the pain of his patients, and when he shot and killed the snitch, Remy, and came very close to killing Louis as well before he was tackled to the deck, his sluggish, uncoordinated limbs were not those of a sober man.

There was only one thing they could do, and Louis did it. Aramis stayed on board as six men in their one remaining, undamaged longboat rowed Athos out to a nearby sandbar, bereft of trees or fresh water; they left him there with a loaded pistol in one limp hand and a full bottle of rum in the other, a final kindness. The breeze was stiff, and carried the ship away too quickly for Aramis to dare looking back, or for him to hear what, he was sure, would be the inevitable shot.

And that, or so he believed, had been that.

*

He left that first ship soon afterwards, along with many others, unwilling to keep sailing under an embarrassment of a captain and the shadow of their sins. The next few years were ones of drifting, from captain to captain and island to island, earning good money from some of them, worse money from others. The islands began to blur together, the hurricanes, the taverns; his hands became dark with the sun and grew ever more refined in their stitching, and he was able to take pleasure, at least, in the gratitude his skill earned him, the relief of pain managed and disease, whenever possible, averted.

In 1757, he found himself on a mainland for the first time since deserting, in a fetid, swampy and stinking La Florida, and back in his element. Pirates, it had turned out, were not the only men for hire out and about in the region, and the company of mercenaries he found himself with reminded him of the Navy with their rough humor and raucous laughter, tightly reined in by their makeshift commanders, as they put their guns to use defending coastal settlements against pirate attacks or, indeed, those of the native Tequesta, Jeaga, and Ais, and escaped Gullah slaves who had made their way south from the American colonies to join them. Fighting in jungles and marshes was something new to Aramis, however, and was overwhelming; he felt damp worming in through his clothes, and the contrasts of thick trees and endless, reedy, water-logged land left him disoriented, made him long for the return of his sea legs and a stiff salt breeze.

He made a friend among those men, the first since he had thought himself Athos’s friend, and it was, for a time, a comfort. Aramis and Marsac were, in fact, strangely similar – both Naval deserters hoping for something else they hadn’t quite defined, both slowly succumbing to the roughening process of the Caribbean in their clothes and manners. Marsac, however, came with a brighter humor than Aramis, a wicked smile rather than a suave one, and a constant nudging shoulder alerting Aramis to the absurdity of their lives, accompanied by a sharp burst of laughter which, on occasion, could turn crueler than Aramis ever could.

After two months, Aramis felt his desire to run away to sea – an urge he had first felt at fourteen when watching the waves crash against cliffs in Wales – pricking at him again, and so, when a small ship flying no colors came into view near the town where they were camped, Aramis whispered his idea to Marsac, and twenty of the other men gladly joined the scheme, and just like that, they stormed the ship where it sat at anchor, slipping out of the water or longboats and swarming up her sides, whooping with glee as they dispatched with the previous crew, and, as dawn broke, they set sail south with Marsac and Aramis as co-captains, giddy with possibilities.

It was only a month later, when resupplying at San Juan, that they understood what a horrible mistake they had made in failing to find out _before_ taking the ship who she belonged to. Word reached them, first in whispers and then in a flood, that the Savoyard was on the warpath for the men who had taken one of his fastest and most successful vessels, and killed his men; they beat a hasty retreat, sailing the ship as quickly as they could between rocky outcrops and shallow reefs in the effort to give him the slip, and Aramis and Marsac hardly slept, taking it in turns to stay awake and scan the horizon for any hint of black sails.

Their efforts, in the end, turned out to be worthless, because as they approached Montserrat, a British ship of the line luffed out to meet them, and, faced with such overwhelming firepower, they could do nothing but surrender.

Standing on the gallows, with Marsac and their twenty companions all side by side and due to hang together for a seemingly endless list of piratical acts, Aramis, ever tactile and longing for the sun on his face, took no comfort in the oh-so-real bristle of the hemp rope around his neck.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Marsac murmured next to him. Aramis was still trying to formulate a response, for once completely wordless, when the world dropped away beneath his feet and the assembled crowd shrieked its pleasure.

It hurt. Blood rushed through his veins and stopped at his neck, swelled his joints, his hands grappling uselessly at the knotted rope as his vision exploded and swam. A creak sounded above him, then, and then a crack – he hit the ground hard, and as the rope loosened and air forced its way down his throat, the sudden rush of adrenaline nearly made him pass out.

He was only told what had happened hours later, lying drunk on oxygen in the tavern he was unceremoniously dumped into; he and Marsac, being the smallest and lightest of the group, were the only two not to have their necks broken by the fall – and then, as the weight of so many twisting, broken men came to bear, the rotting wood of the scaffold had given way, leaving them both gasping and shaking in the mud.

The crowd had cheered. For every traitor killed, the mob demanded heroes, and the flustered governor had mumbled something about God’s grace working in mysterious ways, and allowed them to live.

He woke up next to Marsac the next day, still feeling the presence of death pressing in on him from all sides, and found the other pirate sitting silent and seething, staring at Aramis hard above the ruined flesh of his neck.

“The Savoyard,” he said, voice destroyed down to a whisper. “He told the Navy where to find us. It’s all over town.”

“So?” Aramis forced out. His breath came shallow and fast, his trachea still unable to take in enough to sustain it.

“So I’m going to kill him.”

Marsac left him lying there, and Aramis didn’t see him again; and, in truth, as he recovered and readjusted to his suddenly dreamlike world, he never wanted to. And it took him months, in the end, to come to terms with the scar. His throat healed, and gave him no trouble when he drank to dull his endless nights; the marks themselves seeped out their swelling, receding into dark, jagged lines which he wanted desperately to disappear, to be reclaimed by healthy, sun-kissed skin, but never were.

Eventually, though, there were days when he didn’t think about it – eventually, when he found himself his first new ship, climbed up the rigging to the crow’s nest and treated himself to the sight of islands waking in the dawn, he remembered that his soul had not fled his body, and remembered how to sleep. Early in 1758, he stole a small crucifix from a church on Guadeloupe, and began to wear it on a chain around his neck, tucked inside his shirt against his skin. It would not do, he thought, to tempt fate a second time.

* 

He was on Tortuga, finally, in the spring of 1759 – because no self-respecting pirate could go for more than six months without visiting Tortuga, naturally – when, in the fetid heat of a summer night, and dodging wandering packs of brawling men as he walked through the town, he found himself stopping dead at the sight of a very dirty and piss-drunk man being thrown bodily from the door of a tavern, left carelessly to drown in a particularly deep mud puddle. He would have recognized that particular gilded silver sword-pommel anywhere; but when he lifted Athos, dripping, out of the stink and tilted his face towards him with a hand on his stubbled cheek, there was no corresponding spark of remembrance in the other pirate’s hooded eyes before he passed out onto Aramis’s shoulder.

Aramis hauled him to the boarding-house where he had been planning on staying, greased the landlady’s palm with some extra coin for some clean linen and a bucket of water, and let Athos fall onto the rickety bed with a huff. He stood still, then, for a while, lighting a few candles on the misshapen table next to the bed, and wondering, as Athos mumbled and turned in his sleep, what on earth he thought he was doing.

It was no easy task to rid the finest swordsman in the Caribbean of his clothes and the muck that came with them. Athos had lost weight since Aramis had last seen him receding on that beach, and his skin was pale enough for it to be obvious that he had not been at sea for several months; ribs showed starkly along his chest, and he had acquired such a patchwork of tattoos that it took Aramis a while, in the dim light, to determine where one ended and another began. Down each arm and creeping onto his chest were swooping lines and sharp interlocking curls that Aramis had only ever seen before on men who had visited the tribes of the South Pacific and lived to tell the tale (which meant either a treacherous trip around the Horn or a hellish tramp through the Panamanian jungle to get there); at the base of his spine, as Aramis wet a cloth and set about planing the dirt and evidence of drink off of wasted muscles, were five swallows, each standing for five thousand miles sailed. A black pearl dangled from his left ear, the symbol for surviving the sinking of a ship. What sort of ship, or what exactly it meant, Aramis wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Aramis had never been one to wear the evidence of his life on and in his skin, and he had not taken Athos for such a man, either; but, he reflected – as he saw the spider’s-web of scar tissue on Athos’s right temple, the evidence of a burn which he had no doubt was from the flintlock of the pistol he’d meant to kill himself with – perhaps Athos had, in the five years since Aramis had last laid eyes on him, found himself suddenly rather needing the physical evidence of his wanderings to prove to himself that he was still alive.

Athos came awake, sort of, with a groan just as Aramis was finishing divesting him of his filthy boots, and grabbed at Aramis’s wrist with a strength Aramis would not have thought him capable of. “What the hell do you think you’re – ”

He stopped, suddenly, and blinked with something that would have approached astonishment had he not been so visibly slaughtered. “Good God. Never thought I’d see you again.”

“I could say the same thing,” Aramis said with a smile, peeling Athos’s fingers off of his arm one by one and shoving the other man back into the grubby sheets. “Rest. You need it.”

When he next looked up, having turned away to wash his hands clean, he found Athos still sitting upright and staring at him, as though trying hard to figure something out. “Why?”

“Because we’ve got work to do, in the morning, if we’re to get you a ship,” Aramis said. Athos raised his eyebrows, and in truth, Aramis wasn’t sure what on earth had convinced him that he was confident enough to actually act on the idea which had sprouted in the back of his mind as soon as he’d seen Athos lying in the street.

“Get me a ship,” Athos repeated flatly. “Get out,” he grumbled, turning away from Aramis and settling somewhat more comfortably in the bed with a groan. “I’ve clearly had one too many on this particular godforsaken evening. And when I wake up, you’ll be gone, and I can go on to the next bottle.”

Aramis laughed, very carefully, to make sure that he didn’t betray any of his horror at what Athos’s voice sounded like, destroyed, in what he thought was his solitude. “Shove over,” he said, and clambered into the bed next to Athos, wriggling around until they were curled up back-to-back. “You’ll see what I mean.”

“I’m sure,” Athos mumbled, already half-asleep. Aramis smiled to himself, and blew out the candles.

Aramis woke when the first morning light started to creep, hot and hard, across his face from the window, and when he yawned and rolled over it was to the sight of Athos staring at him, sweating slightly in the heat, eyes dazed with nauseous curiosity.

“You’re still here,” Athos said vaguely.

“I told you I would be.”

“Right,” Athos said – and promptly rolled to the side of the bed so he could violently empty his stomach onto the floor. Aramis fell back into the pillow they had shared, and sighed.

He decided to eschew the offer of more buckets of water from his irate landlady in favor of forcing Athos into his clothes and dragging him to the harbor, where, he found, pushing the hung-over swordsman directly into the ocean from the dock and leaving him to yelp and shout spluttered curses at Aramis as he struggled his way towards the beach, did wonders for his mood. Even better was when he drew his pistol and promised Athos, on pain of a very nasty and inconvenient wound indeed, that he would fire if he dared to come out of the water until he was fit to be smelled within ten feet of any other human being.

He emerged, finally, shaking water from his hair, and, indeed, approximating the typical salt-heavy scent of a sailor disembarking after a long voyage. Cleaned up, his clothes turned out to be in shades of red and dark burgundy, withered gold thread in the seams and on his cuffs. He spat out a mouthful of water into the sand, and, glaring and clearly suffering through a splitting headache, spread his arms out wide for Aramis’s inspection in silence.

“Better,” Aramis nodded, unable to suppress a grin. “Come on.”

“Wait,” Athos said, and, to Aramis’s startled surprise, he reached out and put a damp hand on Aramis’s shoulder, his thumb hovering lightly over the hanging scar. “What happened?”

Aramis swallowed, and felt Athos’s hand tighten on his collarbone. “The Savoyard. Twenty hanged, two survived. You might have heard of it – if you’d been sober.”

He hadn’t meant to sound quite as bitter as he did, but Athos took the nastiness in his tone in stride as he nodded, dropping his hand, and his gaze, to the crucifix hanging between the folds of Aramis’s shirt. “Realized you had something worth living for, I see.”

“Not exactly. How about you?”

Athos’s lips twisted in a mockery of a smile as he let go of Aramis and his hand fluttered briefly towards the scar on his temple before he let it drop. “I haven’t decided yet whether it was God’s intervention that I was drunk enough to miss, or the Devil’s. Or, for that matter, what either of them might have meant by it.”

“Well, you’re still here,” Aramis said, clapping Athos on the shoulder and somewhat relieved, in truth, that they had somehow managed to hold a coherent, even polite, conversation about their respective demons. It felt important, for some reason. “Let’s go. I know exactly where to go to get you a ship, which is where we’ll start, and then getting together a crew should be easy.”

“Why are you doing this?” Athos murmured as he fell into step at Aramis’s side, hand firm on the hilt of his sword. “Some friendly advice – you should never trust a drunk.”

“Because you’re the best swordsman I’ve ever seen, and one of the best navigators, and I’d rather sail under you than any of the other idiots I’ve traveled with in the past few years,” Aramis said cheerfully, and, to his mild surprise, he realized that he believed every word he was saying. “I can put up with a bottle of rum every once in a while.”

Athos snorted, and muttered something about it being rather more than that, but Aramis wasn’t listening as he led them back into the town, dodging drunks and prostitutes. One of the finer establishments on the island – even Tortuga had its classes, just like anywhere else – housed, he knew, the man who would make or break their fortunes.

Treville was holding court with a scattered group of his captains and hangers-on at the back of The Musket, as Aramis had heard he would be, making Aramis grin. He left Athos at the door, looking longingly at the bar, and cleared his throat as he approached the table, straightening his spine as the grizzled pirate admiral looked up impatiently. “Sir. I have a proposition.”

He knew, as Treville put down his glass and leaned back in his seat with nothing more than mild curiosity, that he was lucky to have gotten even that much of a reaction. Sandy-haired and leathered by the sun, Treville – no one knew whether he was French or Dutch, and no one, it seemed, had thought to ask – ran perhaps the largest, and certainly the most successful, fleet of piratical vessels in the region. He fought hard and sold or leased his prizes for prices that were high, but honest; those that crossed him were few and far between because they knew, or they realized quickly, that working for him was in fact the best deal they were likely to get for a ship and access to his contacts and the raft of privateering bonds he held from every European nation; and, besides, the punishment for betraying him didn’t bear thinking about, from what Aramis had heard of body parts washing up in distant harbors. Even the various colonial authorities knew, though they chafed under that knowledge, that they had to tolerate this man and his dealings; and they were afraid, no doubt, of the power which he could corral to his command on sea and on land. Memories of what had happened to Port Royal, and what Morgan had done to Panama, ran deep.

“I’m listening,” Treville said, and Aramis flashed his most winning smile as he leaned over the table between two of Treville’s disgruntled men, and tilted his head backwards to where he hoped Athos was looking suitably dashing, and not getting an early start on his oblivion.

“I have a new captain for you. Finest blade I’ve ever seen.”

One of Treville’s eyebrows rose, and Aramis could tell that there was something about Athos that the admiral recognized – either in his manner, or perhaps he really did know who he was.

Treville tilted his head back at Aramis, smiling casually. “I’ll need proof.”

“And you shall have it,” Aramis nodded, and, bowing slightly, he turned back to the tavern with a dramatic flourish, arms open wide. “Gentlemen!” he shouted cheerfully, and let his grin widen as a few dozen heads lifted from their drinks and focused on him. “A drink on me, and five doubloons, for any man who bests _this_ man – ” here he pointed at Athos, who looked suddenly like he had swallowed a mouthful of sand – “in a duel. Swords only.”

A few cheers rang out, and there were the shadows of men standing around them, big ones armed with broadswords and deep cackles at the sight of Athos’s slight form, as the man in question strode over to Aramis and, apparently aware of Treville’s calculating gaze, hissed into Aramis’s ear low enough that no one else could hear them. “I will _kill_ you for this.”

“Not yet, darling,” Aramis said sweetly, and, grabbing Athos’s shoulders, turned him around to face his first opponent. “Show time.”

It was no contest, of course. Athos was sluggish with the first man, as though re-remembering how to make proper use of his limbs, but he just got faster, and harder, and more determined, dust and sand kicking up around his boots in the dim light as the second man went down with a cut across the back of the knee, and the third and fourth men, armed with daggers, couldn’t get within the reach of his sword; his stance, compared to that of the crouching, scuttling challengers, was one of a dance master, feet nimble and hands swift as he switched the hilt mid-parry between his right hand and his left. It was only as he fought the fifth man – who had gotten up from Treville’s table, and who actually had no small amount of skill of his own – that Aramis saw the thrill of it begin to make its way back into Athos’s face, the return of trance-like movement that he had seen in two dark-haired brothers sparring their way up and down a crowded deck.

Athos beat that fifth man with a hard hit from his sword pommel to the back of the neck, and as the other pirate reeled, Treville put up a hand, and Athos stopped, hurling the man down to the ground and stalking away from him, breathing hard. Aramis stood upright from where he’d been leaning against another table, smiling as Athos approached.

He was in no way prepared for the punch Athos immediately threw into his nose, and the subsequent ringing in his skull, but, in the end, he supposed he had deserved it.

Athos growled something wordless and grabbed Aramis’s arm, dragging them both back over to Treville’s table, where, Aramis just about saw through his blurred vision, there was a bottle of rum and two glasses waiting for them. Athos put his sword down on the table, still bloody and unsheathed, and sat, pulling Aramis down next to him and reaching out in front of Treville to grab the bottle.

“My surgeon,” he said to Treville, as Aramis swayed and blinked in his seat. “Of a sort. He comes with me.”

“Fine,” Treville said. If Aramis hadn’t known better, he would have said that there was a positive twinkle in the admiral’s eyes as Athos downed his first glass. “I have a pretty little brigantine, just into port. Good lines, but she’ll need to be refitted. Those costs can be charged to me – all profit thereafter is split fifty-fifty. I do not,” he added, as the twinkle disappeared and hard lines settled into his face, “tolerate rape or any other abuse of women. Whether you have them on board or no, I don’t care, so long as they are well-treated. I do not encourage killing, except when absolutely necessary.”

He looked between Athos and Aramis briefly, and then reached a hand out across the table. “Do we have an accord?”

Athos didn’t hesitate an instant, and Aramis grinned sharply through the blood that had dripped from his nose as his new captain’s hand grasped Treville’s and shook it firmly. “We do.”

*

[](http://i.imgur.com/Gcqyd8k.jpg)  
"The Finest Swordsman in the Caribbean" by [JakartaInn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn). Click for full-size.

*

The ship turned out to be every bit as beautiful as Treville had intimated. Even sitting at anchor in Tortuga’s harbor with hardly any rigging to speak of and no sails, the unnamed, American-built brigantine, painted in blue and black, was a symphony of clean lines and swooping perfection in her hull, promising speed and quick turns on the tack. Stepping onto her deck for the first time revived them both, straightened their backs and filled their heads with thoughts of waves and strong winds, and Aramis, inspecting the spaces that would be the galley and the surgery in the fo’c’sle, and the large cabin in the stern which they would share whose small glass-paned windows had not yet been dulled by age and cannon-smoke, found it hard to contain his glee.

The next three weeks were a blizzard of preparation. The rigging came first, dark cream sails and stiff white ropes solidifying and tautening her into shape; then came the cannons, twenty of them spread across two decks, and two each of slender bow and stern chasers, a hodgepodge of makers’ marks and bores promising confusion if the crew was not well-drilled (which Athos had every intention of making sure they were). They began to load her, then, her hull sinking genteelly further into the water as her hold filled with fresh water, pickled fruits, dried meat, the ever-present hard tack already taking on weevils. And then, of course, there were the men; young men, for the most part, though Aramis was not averse to the odd wise head, who he found in the taverns and boarding houses during the day and brought to be inspected by Athos every evening, with most being kept and some being turned away. He was looking for a very specific thing in each of them – there was a particular sort of hunger he thought would suit them, a certain hotheadedness that would serve well in a fight, but that would be easily ruled by Athos’s example.

He was successful, for the most part, and appreciated the nods of approval he got from Athos for his choices. And, of course, as their crew grew, the work went even faster, and on the twenty-second day after they had made the deal with Treville, Athos laid an octant, a pile of sounding lines, and a sheaf of patchwork charts upon the table in their cabin – under which stood two chests, one full of bottles, the other of stacked flags in every color – looked out at the hazy morning, and nodded.

The following week, as they put the ship and the men through their paces, was something glorious. Aramis had forgotten, in his years since the Navy, about what pleasure there was in exercises, in discipline, in the camaraderie of chasing men around the decks with encouraging words and chastising blows; he reveled in the creak of rope around his hands and feet as he and Athos scaled the foremast, shirtless and sweating, in a race to the top as their crew urged them on with blasphemous enthusiasm. Athos was willing to allow up to half of their store of shot and powder to be used in getting the men used to their weaponry, and so they did, pounding used wadding and spent shot towards the empty ocean, or towards a deserted island, whooping with glee on their blackened faces when they hit a tree dead-on and splintered the trunk into blasted pieces.

Through it all, Athos drank. Not so much as Aramis had feared, perhaps, but still enough that he left it to Aramis to arrange or oversee the night watches while he retreated to the cabin and eventually succumbed to sleep through the sound of an empty bottle rolling peaceably along the wooden deck. He was careful not to let the crew see, not to let the men go to their hammocks below decks aware of the fact that their leader was oblivious and unarmed – for even the most respected of captains would never be so foolish as to invite an easy mutiny – but he had no such consideration for Aramis, who, once the nights were quiet and the ship made safe, came into their shared space to find Athos in his hammock and speaking to Anne in his sleep, swearing that he would kill her himself, begging her to explain herself in a fervent mumble into the crook of his elbow.

He came shudderingly awake one night towards the end of that first week, as Aramis was already in his hammock and half-asleep himself, and Aramis looked over to him, watched silently as his captain flailed out a hand for sustenance and, realizing that if he reached any further he would fall helplessly to the deck, looked up to meet Aramis’s gaze through a tangle of matted hair. Athos looked as though he was about to speak – but Aramis stopped him by speaking first.

“Tell me about the Pacific.”

That got them through a few nights. Athos spoke, haltingly at first, and then subsiding into a comforting, sleepy mumble, telling Aramis about giant tortoises whose bladders housed fresh water and whose flesh tasted of the very finest mutton; about the war dances he’d seen performed among the islanders; about the endlessness of that ocean, the solace he’d taken in getting lost in it for weeks on end, and the guilt he’d felt when he finally realized he missed the sight of land, and the pace of the Caribbean, and turned around; of the hot needles and ink sinking into his arms under careful Maori hands in Nieuw Zeeland.

For the next few nights, as June turned into July and the nights became still and heavy with heat, Aramis talked about the Channel, about the squalls of wind and rain that blew into Portsmouth where ships of the line sat at anchor; of cool soil and dripping rows of grapes in the hinterland of Bordeaux. He watched Athos to sleep as he spoke, sometimes stealing over the cabin once the captain had nodded off and carefully peeling a glass, or the hilt of his sword, out of his clutching fingers. He brushed hair off of Athos’s forehead, pulled his collar closed against the sudden drafts that came in through the windows; sometimes, he let his hand rest on Athos’s chest for a moment to reassure himself of the rhythm of his heart, let himself admire the muscles that had started to return to the tattooed arms.

The hope of something he couldn’t quite define that was contained in these moments, seemed, to him, to be a forlorn one – until the evening when he came into the cabin, closed the door behind him to shut out the sounds of a few of the crew singing an extremely rude jig further down the deck, and turned to see Athos sitting sprawled in a chair at the rickety table next to his drink, shirt open and disheveled, and looking at Aramis as though he was his salvation.

He crossed over the lilting deck, knelt down, and, keeping his eyes fixed on Athos’s, pressed his cheek to the captain’s hip. Athos’s breath caught, and he clutched at the chair with a white-knuckled grip as Aramis went methodically, and silently, about the business of unbuckling the wide belt, stroking at Athos’s sac with hands he was not ashamed to see were trembling, to press his mouth to pale thighs before licking a long stripe up Athos’s cock and sucking him dry. Athos didn’t touch him, didn’t even put a hand through his hair, seemingly content to struggle with his own self-control, muscles taut in his neck and stomach as he gasped through his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut. Aramis was painfully aware of his own arousal as Athos came with a low groan, but he knew that – on this night, at least – he would get nothing in return, and so he just rearranged himself and left Athos sitting there panting and boneless, walked out into the cool night and stood shadowed in the bows, vibrating with want. He slept with the crew, below decks, taking comfort in the warmth of other bodies hanging in the tough cotton of hammocks so near his own.

It didn’t take Athos as long to sort out the war between his heart and his head as Aramis had expected; it was the very next night, in fact, after a day spent quietly in the surgery and watching the water through the nearest porthole, when the word was passed that the captain wanted Aramis in his cabin. He entered to the sight of Athos fully-dressed and spick-and-span, and of a rough blanket spread across the deck.

“Clothes off,” Athos murmured.

Aramis did as he was told. He undressed himself, folding his things neatly onto the table; he lay down on the blanket on his back, submitted himself to Athos’s cautious inspection. Athos took off his own jacket and shirt, sat next to Aramis and spread his hand along his chest, his shoulders, the long lines of his legs; re-learning, Aramis realized, what a naked body looked like like this, or perhaps even learning for the first time what a _man’s_ body looked like, felt like, and then, tasted like, as he leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to Aramis’s neck.

“So beautiful,” he whispered, and Aramis gasped out his breath, unable to stop himself from propping himself up and pulling Athos into a first kiss, smelling salt and sun on his lips.

Aramis had had many women, and not a few men, in his beds over the years. He was on speaking-or-otherwise terms with half of Tortuga’s female population; there had been a rather memorable escape from the bedroom of a Navy commander’s wife a few years before; sometimes, he had caught Marsac looking at him with something speculative in his eyes, and had welcomed the sentiment even if it had turned out that there had not been time, before that part of his life ended, to act upon it.

He had never allowed himself to love someone who was this _close_ to him, however – someone with whom he shared the inexorable routines of his days, from whom he was glad to receive orders, someone he was to fight alongside, to protect. He was, he realized, as overwhelmed as Athos when, in the aftermath of their taking their first prize, he discovered that he was distracted and made frightened by the sight of Athos hurling himself over the gunwales to board the smaller vessel; by Athos emerging from the smoke of cannon-fire to find him, to run his hand roughly down Aramis’s back to reassure himself that Aramis was with him, and still whole. They fucked for the first time after that particular incident, Aramis guiding Athos inside him and both of them taking a long moment to breathe before they felt able to move together, curses slipping out of the corner of Athos’s mouth as Aramis’s legs wound around his waist.

It wasn’t perfect – it could never be, as tied to their respective pasts as they were, and with the constant threat of being discovered, of subjecting themselves and their buggery (a word Aramis associated with whippings and hangings under a stern Naval gaze) to the judgment of the crew. But it was, Aramis found himself thinking as he watched Athos standing proud and tall at the wheel, turning it gently under skillful hands and letting the ship have her head in the blinding light of sunset, enough for the time being.

*

They found Porthos in August, when the ship was sitting in harbor in wilted, slack water at Port-au-Prince. Aramis was entranced, on a humid evening, by the flash of brilliant gold that encased the enormous man as he sharked money out of all comers, and cheerfully threatened disembowelment and broken bones should anyone challenge his methods. By midnight, he was tipsy and pulling at Athos’s sleeve, insisting that he wasn’t sure why but that he _needed_ this giant to come with them, to brighten their days and their souls, and Athos, probably just indulging a whim, went over to Porthos, put a hand on one massive shoulder, and leaned down to whisper their proposition into his ear.

He came to join them the next morning at the docks with a swivel-cannon on his shoulder and a broad, fierce grin, carrying the huge hulk of metal gun as though it was a feather; on closer inspection, Aramis saw that the lead and iron were engraved with a loving name, BALIZARDE, and that just made him even happier with their decision. Porthos was a whirlwind of belly-deep laughter, an iron stomach when it came to the three of them drinking by torchlight in the dark nights, and a past which included a stinking, hellish ship brought from Africa, whip-scars across his back that were proudly emphasized and made his by his choice of tattoos (lions, eagles in flight, tribal and creole words proclaiming his dual heritages); and, two years before, a slave rebellion on Martinique in which he had found himself strong, and vowed that he would never submit to anyone again against his will.

Aramis gladly relinquished his informal title of first mate to Porthos so he could retreat to the surgery and free himself of some of the more onerous duties of command, and took fierce pleasure in the sight of Athos and Porthos fighting side by side in the few battles they got into; he loved the sight of grown men cowering at the mere sight of Porthos looming over them from the bulwark with his broadsword in his fist. And Porthos came with no expectations, no demands upon them; no judgment, when he walked in on Athos and Aramis curled into each other in the surgery and half-asleep with the remnants of post-raid adrenaline, only another smile and his insistence that they warn him next time with a lock on their door.

A month after he joined them, as hurricane season once again approached, Athos and Aramis rappelled over the stern, tied to the wheelhouse by ropes around their waists, and carefully painted the name Athos had finally chosen for the ship across the band of wood beneath their windows. In yellow-gold paint, which matched the flash of metal in Porthos’s ears, in his coat, in the heavy and tasteful jewelry he wore, the word INSEPARABLE picked up the sun, and dried quickly in the wind which ruffled their hair. As they finished, Porthos cut the ropes holding them where they hung, and as they spluttered and shouted at him from the ship’s foaming wake they could hear him laughing across the water, and Aramis couldn’t help but smile.

*

[](http://i.imgur.com/70heSIw.jpg)  
"Balizarde" by [JakartaInn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn). Click for full-size.

*

d’Artagnan came storming into their lives in the spring of 1760, full of stories of the Savoyard blaming his father’s death on the _Inseparable_. The elder d’Artagnan had been a merchant, it emerged, trading in Virginian tobacco and Jamaican sugar, and after pieces of his ship were spotted half-sunk and charred on a reef near Santo Domingo, his son had gone looking for his killer and had, it seemed, been tricked by the murderer himself into stomping aboard the _Inseparable_ and, having punched Athos straight in the jaw, demanded a duel. Once Porthos had calmed down enough to stop glowering at the boy like he was itching to break his neck, and Athos had stayed quiet enough to impress d’Artagnan into a shy, respectful silence, the plan was hatched, and Aramis felt, unsettlingly, as though they had put a collective foot on a very slippery slope indeed.

They set sail for St. Thomas, and, once there, Aramis went ashore with d’Artagnan to sell on two sacks of sugar, and to start spreading the word. Their fence on the island, who had been recommended to them by Treville, was a shopkeeper’s wife named Constance, whose head for business was far sharper than her dullard of a husband, and who, through some witchcraft Aramis had never managed to quite understand, managed not only to get them a handsome return on all of their stolen goods, but had her ear to the ground in every community, pirate or otherwise, within in a radius of two hundred miles and dozens of islands. She was busy when they entered her cluttered home, bustling about the place with a bright flower in her already-bright hair and flour on her hands and smock, but she stopped when they entered and dropped their burden to her spotless floor, greeting them with a smile.

“Aramis! Late as ever. And who’s this?”

d’Artagnan looked rather like he had been bowled over by a mule, and Aramis resisted only with difficulty the urge to reach sideways and shut his gaping mouth.

“I believe his name is d’Artagnan,” he drawled, and the budding pirate in question shut his jaw with a snap, a blush spreading like wildfire up his cheeks. “Though currently he answers to ‘boy,’ and ‘whelp,’ and…”

“Shut up,” d’Artagnan muttered, and Constance just laughed.

“Don’t mind him,” she chuckled, dusting off her hands and reaching out for the piece of paper on which Aramis had written down the weight and provenance of their spoils. “I think you’re a handsome lad. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

d’Artagnan mumble-squeaked something inaudible, and Aramis shook his head with a smile, before leaning in closer to Constance, worried not only about her husband interrupting them unexpectedly but nervous for his own sake. “We have a message to send,” he murmured. “Could be dangerous.”

Constance, bless her, did not bat an eyelid, and her expression merely changed from one of sweetness to one of attentive concentration. “Tell me."

“Athos de la Fère seeks a duel with the Savoyard.”

She brought a delicate hand to her mouth. “Oh, Aramis. You can’t. For Athos’s sake – ”

“I know,” he sighed, shaking his head. “It was his idea, and nothing we said could persuade him otherwise. We need terms, and a time and place. One-on-one, no seconds, no crews.”

As he said it, he realized how absurd it sounded, and how dangerous. Constance had gone pale, but she nodded resolutely, and grabbed one of his hands, squeezing it briefly. “I’ll put it around. The last I heard, he was at St. Croix. Where will you be?”

“We’ll stay in port here until we get an answer.”

There was a sudden crash behind Constance and through the door to her smoky kitchen, one which sounded of metal and wood and possibly the splatter of food, and she startled away from Aramis with a cry of exasperation, sweet-smelling hair flying. “Mar _got!_ ” She turned quickly back to Aramis, then, pleading and long-suffering in her eyes. “I don’t suppose you need a ship’s cat, by any chance?”

“If it’ll help you, I’m sure we could take her,” d’Artagnan piped up helpfully, and Aramis barely repressed a groan. Five minutes later d’Artagnan was hurrying out with a small bundle of black fur in his arms, Aramis a few steps behind and highly amused at the muffled yelps of pain the boy was making as the cat, which was much stronger than its size would suggest and had a single canine tooth sticking wickedly out over its lip, made clear its displeasure at being so rudely plucked from its mistress by biting every inch of d’Artagnan it could reach. As they got back to the docks, d’Artagnan was jogging and whimpering and the cat was mostly attached to his face by its claws, and as Aramis shoved him up the gangway, finally laughing and helplessly at that, the boy had proceeded to voicing very rude plans to drown the ‘mangy cur’ as soon as possible.

By the time Aramis reached the deck, the cat had disappeared from d’Artagnan’s person and was nowhere to be seen, leaving Porthos giggling at them both as d’Artagnan grudgingly dabbed blood off of his hands and cheeks. A sound of mild curiosity came from Aramis’s side, then, and he looked towards the stern to see Athos standing in front of their cabin door, and looking contemplatively down at his boot, upon which Margot had taken up a curled residence.

“What,” Athos asked calmly, “is this?”

“She’s a menace,” d’Artagnan burst out, and then paused, clearing his throat. “Well. Constance’s menace. Said I’d take care of her?”

“I see.”

“She has a name,” Aramis said loftily. “You’re addressing Margot, mon capitaine.”

“Mm,” Athos said, tilting his head. Margot took that moment as some sort of cue, and very well _climbed_ up Athos’s leg, pricking her claws through his coat until she was sitting on his shoulder and had her tail curled around the back of his neck. The look she gave d’Artagnan, if Aramis had thought cats capable of such emotion, was full of loathing.

“Right,” Athos said casually, and turned away from them to enter the cabin. He was, Aramis noticed, walking extremely carefully, steps soft and spine straight.

“Oh, god,” d’Artagnan sighed. “He _likes_ her.”

A response to their message came quickly – almost too quickly for Aramis’s nerves, in fact – just over a week later, and it could hardly have arrived more dramatically. It was early morning when Aramis heard a cry of pain over the side, and then a tremulous voice calling – “Athos? Aramis?”

Athos looked up sharply from his seat on the stairs leading up to the quarterdeck, and brushed Margot off of his lap as he stood. “Constance?”

Aramis stepped up to the gangway, and had to grab for the bulwark, suddenly, to hold himself up as his throat closed to everything, including air.

Marsac had barely changed, except for the lines and tan in his face having deepened; he was still roughly put together, still had that infuriating smirk that promised mirth and dealt out disdain, still bore the same scars as Aramis stark across his neck. He had Constance’s arm in his firm grip, and she looked as though she had been dragged to the docks rather than having walked there of her own volition – Athos drew his pistol immediately at the sight of her, the sound of it cocking snapping brightly through the quiet dawn as he pointed it at Marsac’s head.

“Let her go,” he said, low and deadly, and Marsac immediately took the hint, holding up his empty hands; Constance tripped towards the gangway and Athos met her at the bottom, putting his free arm around her shoulders. “Did he hurt you?”

“I just wanted her to tell me what was going on,” Marsac said plaintively, a sharp smile of disgust on his face. “Imagine my surprise, Aramis,” he continued, and Athos looked quickly up at him, “when I heard that you were planning on taking out the Savoyard without me.”

Aramis forced in a breath, reminded himself that the rope was no longer around his neck, that he _could_ breathe, and that he did not need to allow the sight of his fellow victim to take him back to that place. “I don’t owe you anything, Marsac,” he said, as firmly as he could, and saw comprehension dawn on Athos’s face. “And you and I are not the only ones in these islands to want revenge on the Savoyard. Get out of here.”

“Oh no, no,” Marsac burst out, his face darkening with anger as he took a step towards Aramis and the ship, only to be blocked again by the barrel of Athos’s gun. “I intend to be there when your so-called swordmaster fights the bastard. I’ve spent three years hunting him and I will _not_ let him slip away this time. I want to know what she’s got to tell you!”

“She doesn’t owe you anything either,” Aramis hissed, his knuckles white where he gripped the gunwale, torn between what he owed Constance and Athos and what he knew, somewhere deep down that he had firmly buried, he owed Marsac.

“What do you have?” Athos said quietly, and Constance sniffed, still watching Marsac warily, as she put a hand into her bustle and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper.

“His terms,” she mumbled. “The beach opposite Waterlemon Cay, on St. John’s, three days from now. Both ships out of sight, one rowboat from each ship, the captain and one man to row. That’s it.”

“Then we leave this morning,” Athos said, and turned towards the ship. “d’Artagnan!” Somewhere above them, the boy fell out of his hammock with an audible thump, and within a minute he was scrambling onto the deck, his face opening wide with concern at the sight of Marsac, Constance, and Athos’s pistol.

“Take Madame Bonacieux home,” Athos ordered, and d’Artagnan was quick to obey, wrapping his coat around Constance’s shoulders as they hurried away from the docks. “And you,” Athos said to Marsac, clearly furious, “will come on board only if you agree to stay below decks, and stay silent. I would not deny any man their revenge, but if you compromise anything, I will kill you.”

“Agreed,” Marsac gritted out. On the deck, Aramis turned away from them and closed his eyes, wishing that he had never heard of any man called the Savoyard; never seen a face so like Athos’s and yet not dead beneath his heel, never heard a beautiful woman confess to being that man’s agent, never felt the burn of hemp around his neck.

But he could not change the past, and so, with Marsac under Porthos’s stern watch and d’Artagnan actually playing with Margot to calm his own anticipation, they sailed for St. John. Aramis slept badly or not at all, preferring to watch over Athos, who, paradoxically, spent more and more time resting on those few hot days, sitting calmly on the quarterdeck steps with his hand stroking mildly at Margot’s fur, or standing slumped over a bulwark, watching the waves and the cut of the sails in the steady wind. On the second night Aramis woke from an uneasy sleep in the pre-dawn watch to find himself safely ensconced in Athos’s arms, fingers playing lightly along his neck, pressing reassuringly on his pulse, tracing his scars.

“Don’t you dare die in front of me,” Aramis said and thought suddenly, clutching at Athos’s wrist, wanting to kiss every inch of him. “Not again.”

“You know full well I can’t promise anything,” Athos murmured in response, pressing his lips to Aramis’s temple. “But you should also know that whatever happens, I consider this worth it, for you, and for d’Artagnan. And even for him.”

“And for yourself?”

Athos was silent for a moment, and his hand stilled on Aramis’s skin. “She’d talked for a while about joining another crew,” he finally said, sounding not so much grief-stricken as exceptionally weary. “I can’t imagine what she was thinking. I would never have sailed under the likes of him.”

He pulled Aramis closer, sighed into the crook of his neck. “I suppose I hate him, for that. For my not having the chance to ask her what she wanted.”

On the third morning, they stood with Porthos and d’Artagnan at the side, with much of the crew clustered nervously around them, and looked out over the Cay – a small island nestled into a bay, beyond which lay the beach on which the duel would take place. The rowboats would approach from opposite sides around the island, and the channels were too narrow by far for either the _Inseparable_ or the Savoyard’s brig, when it arrived, to sail close enough to aid the duelists.

“Stone beach,” Porthos growled. “Hard to keep your balance. ‘Specially on sea legs. He’ll try to throw you off balance.”

“No doubt,” Athos replied. He was pale under his tan, but both he and Aramis had slept well, in the end, and his weapons were clean and polished, ready for death. And so, as the sun neared its noon zenith, Athos pulled the very unhappy-looking d’Artagnan into a brief embrace, and clapped Porthos on the shoulder. “You know what to do, Porthos.”

“Aye,” Porthos said fiercely. “We’ll be ready.”

Athos and Aramis jumped down into the longboat, and Aramis was just about to take up the oars to row, when there was a sudden exclamation of rage above them, and then Marsac dropped like a stone into the stern of the boat, nearly catapulting all of them into the water.

“You fool,” Athos hissed as the small vessel rocked its way back to equilibrium, and as Aramis careened his way upright again it was to the sight of two very loaded and very dangerous pistols in Marsac’s hands. “The challenge said two men, and only two men, from each ship. Are you trying to get us all killed?”

“Shut up and row,” Marsac said tightly. Aramis could see that his hands were shaking. “Aramis. Please.”

“Don’t,” Aramis burst out, throwing out a hand to cut Marsac off. “Just don’t. We need to go, now.”

He and Athos sat, eventually, and cast off, setting themselves to the oars, as Porthos rained a torrent of abuse down on Marsac’s head. There was little, however, that their friend could do, and as they slowly approached the Cay, the crew of the _Inseparable_ swarmed up the masts on their first mate’s orders, and the ship slipped around the headland out of sight. Aramis’s chest grew tight as she disappeared, and beside him, Athos let out a huffed sigh.

They rowed to within thirty feet of the beach, and then shipped the oars, waiting. Soon enough, though it felt like forever as sweat began to slip down Aramis’s brow, a second longboat appeared from the opposite shore of the island, and pulled its way powerfully towards them. There were just two men in this boat – one, at the oars, a thin and lithe greybeard who had clearly spent his entire life at sea; and the other, tall, bull-powerful, and visibly seething, was the Savoyard.

“We said two men,” the Savoyard blared across to them, as his boat neared the shore, and came close enough for him to be heard over the gusting breeze. “You’ve broken our terms.”

“Just another man to row the boat,” Athos called as he stood precariously in the bows, hands out at his sides in supplication. “Nothing to break our arrangement over.”

The Savoyard grunted, and pulled a pistol from his belt. Aramis felt a cold sweep over him like an Atlantic winter chill.

The bullet splattered into the crook of Marsac’s neck, and he made not a sound as he fell, backwards, into the water, spreading clouds of blood and bone. Aramis sat down heavily, knocking one of the oars overboard as well, and was not aware of anything for quite some time until he felt the heavy, trembling touch of Athos’s hands on his own.

“Aramis,” Athos said, as though from very far away, and Aramis looked up through his daze, so very aware that it could have been him, it _should_ have been him, that the Savoyard could have aimed for either of them and yet it was he who was still sitting there, sun beating down on his head and Athos kneeling before him, silently begging him to come back.

“Aramis,” Athos said again, and this time his voice wormed into Aramis’s ears with an insistence that grounded him, reminded him of why they were there and what they had to do. “I’m going ashore. Wait for me.”

“Of course,” Aramis choked out. Athos smiled, hard and fast, and leaned forward to press a bruising kiss into Aramis’s mouth. When he withdrew he left Aramis struggling for breath, and, taking off his coat, he slipped over the side into the shallow water, wading his way towards the beach where the Savoyard, dripping and sneering, waited.

If Aramis or the Savoyard’s man had expected there to be any conversation, any airing of grievances or intimations of revenge from either side, they were to be disappointed. The Savoyard attacked just as soon as Athos emerged from the water, leaving him barely the time he needed to draw his sword, and the rough pebble of the beach beneath their feet left them both stumbling and slipping as Porthos had suspected, blades made wild by the uneven terrain. The Savoyard was bigger, though, and knew it, used the weight of his muscles to its natural advantage to plant himself and send Athos careening backwards with the force of his sword. Athos was faster to recover, faster to find his footing, but was, so far, as Aramis hunched in his boat and clutched at his remaining oar just to have something to hold, unable to find his way within the Savoyard’s guard.

It happened quickly, so quickly that Aramis nearly missed it. None of them aboard the _Inseparable_ had expected the Savoyard to fight fair, but even they hadn’t planned ahead for this – the sudden appearance of a second dagger from inside the Savoyard’s shirt, the twirl he would not thought such a massive man capable of, and then, ripping away what was left of Aramis’s composure, the snarled cry of pain as the blade buried itself in Athos’s shoulder and twisted there, leaving his sword falling from his nerveless hand and his body sagging into the Savoyard’s. Aramis had never been more petrified as he startled up, felt the boat rock beneath his shifting weight, tried and failed to scream.

And he had never been prouder, he realized later, when Athos used the Savoyard’s shoulder to push himself up; ripped the blade out of his collarbone with his own bloody hands; and plunged it into the Savoyard’s neck. The big man fell without a sound, crunching into the rocks, and Athos fell to his knees beside him; to one side, Aramis was suddenly aware of the Savoyard’s man standing in his longboat and pulling out a pistol, fury across his face –

Balizarde spoke, thundering out from the trees a hundred feet further down the beach, and the boat exploded into splinters under the feet of the Savoyard’s man, the water swallowing him up without a sound, and Aramis gasped with relief as he saw Porthos standing up from the treeline, leaving the swivel cannon behind him as he rushed down the beach; Aramis threw himself into the water, forcing his way through the surf to catch Athos as he crumpled.

“Got him,” Athos said vaguely as Aramis braced him against his chest and plunged his hand into the ruins of Athos’s shirt, feeling blood seeping out against his palm. “Didn’t I?”

“You did,” Aramis whispered, rocking them both, frightened at the sheer amount of blood, but refusing to even entertain the idea that the wound could be fatal, because Athos was not the sort, it had been proven, to die easily. Porthos reached them quickly, and grinned hard even in the face of Athos’s wound, patting Athos’s hands with his.

“d’Artagnan will bring _Inseparable_ back ‘round any minute,” he said, every muscle in his smile loose with happy revenge. “You little bastard.”

“You trusted him with the ship? That wasn’t the plan,” Athos asked in what sounded like complete bewilderment, and Aramis felt a great surge of relief shudder through him at the thought that any of this was funny.

The _Inseparable_ shivered her way around the headland, then, in the changeable breeze, and as Aramis felt Athos murmur something indecipherable, but undoubtedly happy against his arm, he closed his eyes and thought, strangely, that he was blessed to have found himself such lodestars as these.

*

_Lodestar: a star that leads or guides; one that serves as an inspiration, model, or guide; Polaris._

_–[MWD](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lodestar)_

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **ETA:** be sure to check out [RevolutionaryJo](http://archiveofourown.org/users/RevolutionaryJo/pseuds/RevolutionaryJo)'s [wonderful podfic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1837459) of this chapter!
> 
>  **A/Ns:** First off, I’ve always had a _really_ hard time figuring out Aramis’s voice, so apologies if he sounds totally wrong in this! The Seven Year’s War ran on and off between England, France, the American colonies, and several other European powers from 1754-1763, and involved a hell of a lot of privateering/pirating which spilled over into the colonial regimes in the Caribbean, among other places. And one of my favorite things about early modern pirating, which I definitely tried to convey in this, is how _ordinary_ it was – thefts of goods were far, far, _far_ more common than the theft of treasure, and violence was often not a necessary or even desired part of any of the thieving that went on. A few barrels of fish, oil, pitch, or especially sugar, could make a raid a successful one. Other smaller details which I dropped in – pirate tattoos  & symbolism, the slave rebellion on Martinique, Nieuw Zeeland/New Zealand, the geography of St. John’s (one of my favorite places on earth), etc. – are, I hope, mostly self-explanatory as presented here, though I’m happy to pick up on and further explain/discuss anything you like in comments, or indeed correct things that wiser heads than me know more about!
> 
> Musical inspiration included Marc Streitenfeld’s soundtrack for _Robin Hood_ (2010 – [hero theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI_2N4ydfDc), [villain theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCEWqM3wIj8), [happier times theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAG3Uf7psBA), [tragic theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2IShisLsus)), and, of course, [Kevin Kline as the Pirate King](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ7SVMVrick). And thanks to JakartaInn for letting me borrow her Mago/Margot. :-) 
> 
> Title for this particular chapter is from Spenser’s _Amoretti_ , Sonnet 33:
> 
> LYKE as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde,  
>  by conduct of some star doth make her way,  
>  whenas a storme hath dimd her trusty guyde,  
>  out of her course doth wander far astray.  
>  So I whose star, that wont with her bright ray,  
>  me to direct, with cloudes is ouer-cast,  
>  doe wander now, in darknesse and dismay,  
>  through hidden perils round about me plast.  
>  Yet hope I well, that when this storme is past,  
>  My Helice the lodestar of my lyfe  
>  will shine again, and looke on me at last,  
>  with louely light to cleare my cloudy grief.  
>  Till then I wander carefull comfortlesse,  
>  in secret sorrow and sad pensiuenesse.
> 
> **More ‘verses to come!** Thanks for reading.


	2. Such Labour Like the Spider's Web

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2: A ‘Cold War’ AU, inspired by a kink meme prompt and crossing over heavily with the world of John le Carré’s _Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy_ ; Jack Treville takes over the British Secret Service in 1961 after one of its prime agents defects to Russia, and it takes a lot of work to get things back on an even keel. Gen OT3, implied Porthos/Aramis, past Athos/Milady, Treville-centric. **Warnings:** violent deaths, frequent mention of physical and psychological torture and its aftermath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the darkest thing we’ve done yet, and possibly the most confusing or the most obscure(ish). John le Carré’s fantastic spy thriller oeuvre is the inspiration for [this kink meme prompt](http://bbcmusketeerskink.dreamwidth.org/774.html?thread=1798#cmt1798) fill, focusing on _Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy_ and, even more specifically, the [fantastic 2011 film adaptation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPKhWXhiMSw) of the book, which starred Gary Oldman (that link will take you to a trailer for the film, which, while overly dramatic, might give someone new to this ‘verse a good taste of it). The fic uses the world of _TTSS_ without taking any of its characters, so it’s halfway between a crossover and an AU/AR. Heed the warnings – lots of violent and scary stuff going on. Other than that, we hope you enjoy it! Oh, and thank you THANK YOU all for the fantastic reaction to the previous pirate!AU, we couldn’t be more flattered!

*

[  
](http://i.imgur.com/A7jGhl7.jpg)"A Hotel on Liverpool Street" by [JakartaInn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn). Click for full-size.

*

**TRADECRAFT JARGON**

BABYSITTERS | BODYGUARDS  
CHICKENFEED | USELESS OR DISTRACTING INFORMATION  
THE CIRCUS | LONDON HOME OF MI6  
COAT TRAILERS | ENEMY AGENTS WHO WANT A TAIL/DEFECTION OFFER  
GOLD/GOLD DUST/TREASURE | USEFUL INFORMATION  
HOUSEKEEPERS | INTERNAL AUDITORS  
INQUISITORS | INTERROGATORS  
JANITORS | CIRCUS HEADQUARTERS STAFF  
LAMPLIGHTERS | SURVEILLANCE AND COURIERS  
LEGEND | FALSE IDENTITY  
MAILFIST JOB | ASSASSINATION  
MOTHERS | FEMALE SECRETARIES  
NEIGHBORS | RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICE  
PAVEMENT ARTISTS | SURVEILLANCE, FOLLOWERS  
QUARANTINE | FORCED RETIREMENT  
REPTILE FUNDS | FINANCE FOR COVERT OPERATIONS  
SCALPHUNTERS | HIT MEN  
SHOEMAKERS | FORGERS  
WRANGLERS | RADIO ANALYSTS AND CRYPTOGRAPHERS 

*

Jack Treville joined MI6 straight from the wartime Secret Intelligence Service, transitioning uneasily, as did dozens and hundreds of others, from the hard and simple realities of day-to-day combat, and the battlefields of Europe, to the chilly London headquarters of the new MI6, the Circus, on Shaftesbury Avenue. The world was a confusing place, in 1945; with Germany fracturing and Russia steamrolling through Eastern Europe, Treville, like many others, had struggled to find their footing. It was a relief for him, in the end, that he received what had been, at the time, one of the easiest assignments in the new service: overseeing the scalphunters, a legion of sharp, deadly young men, many of them war veterans, who flew around the world taking care of dirty business and bloody little jobs that left nothing behind but body parts and lonely women. It appealed to the solder still lurking in Treville, the silent thrust of knives and the ever-more sophisticated silencers on bigger and better pistols; the uncomplicated orders handed down on high which he would then facilitate for his boys.

It took him a decade to work his way up to something ostensibly more prestigious, acting as a Section Leader and a top advisor to Control at the Circus instead of in Brixton, by 1955. Here he learned a whole different tradecraft: new and far more complex codes, the value of delicately-balanced and always tenuous ethnic and sexual networks, and the existence of a shadowy force in Moscow headed by someone named Karla. He learned how to moderate his sometimes sharp temper, how to listen and how to know when to smile and wheedle and hold information close to his chest; he learned how to communicate with the prickly, tantrum-prone man that was Control on the fifth floor, how to carefully talk about everything and nothing with his similarly-placed high-level colleagues, and, perhaps most importantly, how to ingratiate himself with Richelieu, the Undersecretary to the Minister for the Service, who was practically their only link to the government, to the money they needed, and to the outside world.

It was also in this time, around ’58 or ’59, that he started to recruit his own field agents – lamplighters, pavement artists, wranglers who were loyal only to him and thought of the wider Service only when he told him to. There were mothers, women he would trust more deeply than his own kin; janitors who were the only men he would trust with his papers and to keep an eye for him on the doings of the other, also-scheming sections around him. And then, in ’59, he went on a typical fact-finding and recruiting trip to Oxford and Cambridge to rootle around in the latest class of eager graduates and up-themselves academics for anyone who might prove useful, and came across a young, whipsmart Senior Lecturer in French Literature whom previous sweeps had unaccountably missed, and the beautiful and dangerous wife who came with him.

Athos and Anne slipped seamlessly, almost too seamlessly, into life at the Circus. They arrived naïve and completely dependent on one another; the naivety vanished quickly with the completion of their first execution of an undercover job in Marrakesh, but the dependency remained, along with the absurd trust they held in each other, and in Treville. They were good, and kept getting better whether they worked together or alone. By the spring of ’61 they were in the middle of preparing to head up a new section of their own, in North Africa, when a group of generals attempted to overthrow De Gaulle and Treville flew out to Paris to put his impeccable French to good use in lending whatever help he could to the severely overstretched intelligence men (he used the term very loosely – they were French, after all) there as they dealt with the crisis.

He received his first terse, clumsily decoded telegram from home three days after he arrived. ‘ANNE DE LA FERE DEFECTED,’ it said, and Treville sat down very carefully at the dressing table in his hotel room, suddenly oblivious to everything. ‘RETURN HOME IMMEDIATELY. M. DE LA FERE IN CUSTODY.’ He heard only snatches from then on as he methodically put his travel arrangements in place: that Control was furious, and wanted Treville’s head on a block as soon as possible; that Anne had apparently been stealing and passing on treasure for months; that Athos had been taken from their marital bed as he slept and whisked away by inquisitors, and no one was sure where he was.

By the time his way was cleared and he made it back onto English soil, the inquisitors had had Athos at the debriefing center in Sarratt for over forty-eight hours. Treville had never had the misfortune to be in their clutches for any perceived misdemeanor, but he remembered all too well, from his wartime training, the whispered subtlety of their methods. Not for them the electrical shocks or the thugs specially hired for their fists that the Russians so enjoyed; goodness no, they were British, don’t you know, and so their favored methods tended gently towards sleep deprivation, flickering lights and quietly murmured questions through the head-splitting distortions piped through headphones directly into their target’s ears. They hadn’t touched the man, they would protest. He is whole, and ready for your interview, sir; our straps are artisan-made out of the finest leather, and would never leave marks unless he were to struggle, which is, of course, not in his best interests. We are none of us brutes, sir, and will protest against any attempt to brand us as such.

Treville had been assigned a driver when he got off the Calais-Dover ferry, a Special Forces man who, no doubt, had been told not to let the Section Leader out of his sight for an instant. Given the hard cast of the man’s face, Treville was somewhat surprised that his plan to hold him at gunpoint and get him to drive to Sarratt instead of straight to London proved successful. It was only when they drove through the gates of the training complex with no trouble, too, that it occurred to him that perhaps this man, and others, were as frightened as he was and as angry about what was happening at the Circus that had led to Athos being here, and dread settled in Treville’s stomach like lead at the idea that the entire Service was, over this, pulling itself apart at the seams.

The inquisitors scrambled out of their chairs as he stormed into their cramped basement of a space, wafting through pipe-smoke and the sound of gently clicking tape recorders. “Where is he?”

“Still cooking,” one of them, a tall, shoulder-bowed man, said, light eyes flat and nervous. “We’ve had our orders, sir.”

“Have you found anything?”

“Sir?”

“Fuck’s sake, man. You’ve been working him for information on Anne, and on whether he knew. Well?”

The man sucked briefly on a cigarette, not meeting Treville’s gaze. “Not much, sir. Control thinks he must’ve known, but – ”

Treville stepped towards the door, gestured to the lock. “Get him out.” At the startled flutter of panic around the room, he merely sneered. “Open this _fucking_ door, or you’ll be in Algeria within a week.”

He was to reflect, much later, with never-dulled anger, that the inquisitors had had no need to do their work quite so thoroughly as they had. _Don’t break_ , he had always been told in his frequent reminders of how to safeguard oneself against an enemy: _just don’t break. Bury something you want to keep yours so deep that they’ll never find it, and just hold on_.

But Anne had been the whole core of what Athos was, and with her gone, Treville knew, his agent had sat in the inquisitors’ chair willingly and already broken, and so the rest – the whispering recordings, the wrists firmly secured to the arms of the wooden chair, the yawning girl in the corner reading the _Telegraph_ in between re-tightening the straps, the fading dabs of blood on the concrete floor – functioned as punishment, nothing more or less, and when he settled Athos against him, rubbed his hands between his own to get his blood flowing again as the head inquisitor hovered, anxious and maybe even somewhat repentant, Treville could have sworn that the low moan that floated up from Athos’s chest was one of protest, not relief.

He told the Special Forces man to take Athos to London, to a safe house he knew in Lauriston Gardens near the scalphunters’ haunt that was standing empty and would serve as some sort of haven while he made sure the carefully cleared-out home Athos and Anne had shared in Mayfair was sold on (perhaps, he thought, it would be better if it was destroyed entirely). And then, squaring his shoulders, Treville got on a train to London, ignored the black Circus car with no plates that waited for him at the station, and instead took a cab straight into Westminster, hammering on the Minister’s door just before midnight and glaring as fiercely as he could muster at a genuinely frazzled-looking Richelieu when he opened it, midway through protesting that the Minister was not to be disturbed.

“Good God,” Richelieu said nastily. “The pariah returns.”

“We’re going to talk,” Treville said, hard and fast. “Now.”

He stayed closeted in the Minister’s office for the next three days, being brought stale sandwiches by Louis’s secretary and, very slowly and somewhat reluctantly, wresting control of the Circus into his own hands. Richelieu had been skeptical at first, as much of Treville’s abilities as his methods, but he came to see the value of persuading the Minister, sweetly, that it was a gross breach of discipline for Control to have been so careless in his recruitment of his agents, to not have realized that that sharply calculating quality in Anne had always augured trouble; that it was a scandal, and a disgrace, for Control to bluster that what had happened at Sarratt was necessary, that it was only collateral damage, that the fact that Anne had blown every network they had in North Africa overnight warranted the drastic measures to find out what else she might have known and done. It helped that the Minister liked Treville, liked his straight stare and preference for old-fashioned methods, and knew that Treville and Richelieu had the potential to be canny old devils together.

And so, after seventy-two hours of exhausted catnaps in Richelieu’s chairs, and sweat gathering along the back of Treville’s neck as he fought for his career and possibly his life, Control came into the Minister’s office; signed his curlicued green ‘C’ for the final time, on his letter of resignation; and Treville could finally go back to his home in Hammersmith, sink into his bath, snatch a couple of hours of sleep to re-order his mind and teach himself how to walk differently out of his door, to accept the burden of a nation’s secrets on his shoulders.

Richelieu had said, as he walked Treville to his car, that he looked forward to them doing great things together. Only time would tell, Treville knew, whether he had made a bargain with God or the Devil when he first took up the heavy, green-inked fountain pen and tucked it into his breast pocket.

He was too busy over the next month – mopping up the remnants of the networks Anne had brought down, horsetrading for those who were still alive, and making sure that the Circus was quickly staffed with the janitors, mothers, and lamplighters he knew were loyal to him, and, more importantly, of a decent sort – to give as much thought as he should have to Athos. He did, however, make what he thought was a good decision, in his first week in the job, to assign one of his best former scalpers to guard duty on the house in Lauriston Gardens. Porthos was an anomaly to the Circus in almost every respect: he didn’t normally drink nor smoke, had come up from the East End rather than down from Oxbridge, and, so far as Treville had known, had no wives scattered around the globe, no bastard children. What he did have was massive hands and a startling and cheerful delicacy with throat-cutting knives, a rough and ready ability to pick up the dirty street-patois of whatever country he was in, and the fiercest, and most dangerous, sense of loyalty that Treville had ever encountered.

What he and Athos would make of each other, Treville had no idea. The reports he received – short, clipped, and repetitively full of blackouts and binges, interspersed with the (albeit justified) moodiness of a teenager – unsettled him. It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, that when he eventually made it to Brixton, as the first warm rains of summer were starting to cloud the London skies, he found Porthos happy with his lot and Athos, if not sober, at least more conscious that he had had any right to imagine.

They had unexpectedly chainsmoked together, that much was clear, from the rapid yellowing of the dingy wallpaper in the house; and Porthos had seen fit not only to provide Athos with as much alcohol as he wanted, but also with clothes from what was probably his own meager store, judging how the dark blue button-down swamped Athos’s waist and fell far over his wrists, and nearly down to the knees of his corduroys. Porthos lounged on the cracked leather settee, statuesque in his jeans and vest as he cleaned one of his many guns, while Treville and Athos whispered slowly in a corner of the brightly-lit sitting room, somehow mindful, despite the fact that the house had been thoroughly cleaned of bugs, that neither of them dared to be overheard.

“You need to know something,” Athos muttered, barefoot, thin and close to feverish as he drew deeply on his cigarette. “About Anne.”

Treville noted with approval, and relief, that the utterance of her name seemed to cause Athos no visible pain. “Go on.”

“She’s playing a game,” Athos continued, staring out of the window they stood by, his eyes pale and blank. “If there’s one thing I know about her – knew – it’s that she holds no loyalties. She enjoys the _hunt_ , you see,” he said, and finally there was a tinge of sadness in him, some awareness that it was she who had led him into this state. He looked back at Treville, suddenly deadly serious. “You should consider carefully whether you think it’s possible that she’s still in touch with someone in England. Working for just one master won’t be enough for her.”

The hypothetical sent Treville’s mind racing, and despite how ridiculous he found the idea that any of the team he had assembled would be so monumentally stupid – or so clever – he knew that he would have to investigate, and that it would be hellishly difficult. “Right,” he sighed. “What about you?”

“I need a job,” Athos said instantly. “If I stay here much longer, I’ll go mad. Again.” A smile twisted at the corner of his mouth as he exhaled smoke. “I don’t care where you send me. Anywhere. Station leader, pavement artist, anything. I can’t keep hiding.”

Treville nodded, and then inclined his head backwards, towards where, he knew, Porthos was listening in to every word he could hear. “I’ll see what I can do. You can have him if you like.”

“He’s a godsend,” Athos said quietly, turning slightly to smile at Porthos, and Treville nearly winced at the look of surprisingly unguarded, grateful fondness that was suffused across his face. “But then again, _you_ sent him, so that can’t be right.”

Treville decided, in the end, to use them to set up a new substation in Istanbul, where the previous staff were edging towards retirement and unable to deal with the constant influx of Russian tendrils via trade delegations, embassy staff, and Moscow Centre hoods. A third man, or rather a second agent to pair with Athos while Porthos acted as babysitter, was necessary; on the recommendation of Dutch intelligence he found one in Aramis, a youngster who had spent a few furiously dedicated years setting up solid networks in Chile and Argentina and was well-known for his language skills. He added Turkish to his stable with very little delay; the shoemakers and mothers worked up or reworked the legends (French businessmen, working an export-import front); and at the end of June, Olivier de la Fère, Isaac du Vallon, and René d’Herblay crossed the border between Greece and Turkey with no flags raised, and within a week, their first messages started to filter through to the Circus’s wranglers.

In the following months, Treville felt his other name, ‘Control,’ start to seep slowly into his being; felt the self-respect of the Circus miraculously solidifying, the collective determination of a group of ordinarily extraordinary people closing ranks and repairing themselves. He sat at the center of a spider’s web, he sometimes thought, and the threads to Tangiers, Istanbul, Paris, Madrid, Prague, Athens, Cairo, Hong Kong, New York, all the dozens and hundreds of cells, tangled and lodged themselves intertwined in his mind. Every time a silken thread trembled it vibrated back to him, tugged his attention this way and that as news worked its way up the hierarchies to where he sat and deliberated on the fifth floor, assembling his thoughts into comprehensive reports for Richelieu and the Minister.

He encouraged, without words, the closing in of the nights, the fanatical devotion of the janitors, the double- and triple-encoding of transmissions, the strict following of procedures in text and in deed; and by the end of the year, he was confident, at least in his own mind, that there was no one inside the Circus who could possibly have still been in touch with Anne de Breuil.

Outside the Circus, however, was an entirely different matter.

*

[  
](http://i.imgur.com/6rJi7Ec.jpg)"Still Cooking" by [JakartaInn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn). Click for full-size.

*

1963 started briskly, and became ever more tense, with tempers and missions balanced on glass edges as the fallout of the Bay of Pigs subsided and the Americans and Moscow crept towards their first nuclear test ban agreement. Treville spent much of the first half of the year shuttling between them, feeling uncomfortably and irritably like a messenger-boy; but, he comforted himself, if it kept Richelieu off of his back and his agents in relative safety, he supposed that being someone else’s dogsbody could be tolerated.

Porthos was a cheering presence in this time, bringing Treville bottles of raki and ouzo whenever Istanbul was quiet and he took a few days’ leave to come home and report, and perhaps do some dirty work on the way home or the way back out. He talked of the station and their specks of gold dust, first and foremost, but Treville, whose perception, he flattered himself, was sharpening rather than dimming with age, noticed that he spoke primarily of Aramis, of how the kid settled into the work like a tailor-made suit, how they stalked coat trailers together, laughing into their drinks at the Russians’ pathetic attempts to conceal their Moscow Centre training (because really, how could a hood ever drum out of his mind and muscles the constant awareness of the exits in a room, the doubling-back on their path as they walked through the streets, the nonchalant passing of letters or dropping of items in letterboxes?). Aramis was calm, Treville heard from these speeches of Porthos’s, and competent, and one for the ladies, though he was always home by morning. And Athos was still drinking, but he had started smiling at them, led them with a firm hand, and always knew, as if by some sixth sense, whether a lead was good or rotten. Treville, it seemed, had no reason to doubt his decision, and indeed the risk he had taken, in sending them out there.

Then, in mid-July – at the worst possible time, for the nuclear treaty was due to be signed any day – one of the Circus wranglers came to Treville to say that the Istanbul station had missed their morning check-in, and then the phones started ringing off the hook, and the duty officers waited impatiently for a brief as Treville barricaded himself in his office, got Richelieu on the blower, and told the soon-irate Undersecretary that a Russian embassy attaché had been gunned down in the street near the Suleymaniye Mosque, and that the building housing the fake import firm of De la Fère, Du Vallon, and D’Herblay had been found burned to the ground soon after. News came in half an hour later that two men, both Caucasian and dark-haired, had been seen being carried from one van to another in Çorlu, heading quickly for the Bulgarian border.

That just left Porthos unaccounted for, and as no body turned up, Treville was left alone in defending the possibly-defected scalper. In public – in meetings with Richelieu, the Minister, and his subordinates – he acknowledged the possibility that the hit man had turned, but he knew better. He felt it in his bones, with a certainty most unbecoming of a spy, that Porthos was innocent, and would turn up. And so it proved when, a day later, still at his phone and finally negotiating in spitted Russian with his counterpart in Bulgaria, who was coyly demanding the crown jewels in return for his – regrettably already harmed – agents, another wrangler brought Treville a message which read DU VALLON TO CONTROL, DECYPHER YOURSELF and he growled, banged down the phone, and decoded a meeting time and place.

Porthos had made it back to England in one piece, and as Treville stepped out of the Circus, ostensibly for a smoke, and lingered at a dingy newsstand a few blocks further down Shaftsbury Avenue, the scalphunter loomed suddenly out of the darkness of an adjacent alleyway.

"For god's sake, get out of here," Treville said irritably, crushing his cigarette beneath his heel. "If you're seen, even I won't be able to save you from Richelieu."

Porthos didn't retreat, just glowered at him from his hiding place, hands made into fists in big pockets. “I didn’ do it.”

“I know _that_ , damn it.”

"You must have something to trade. Somethin' that'll get them back."

"Did it occur to you," Treville hissed, taking a step towards his errant scalper, "that your message interrupted my efforts to do just that? I stuck my neck out far enough for you, and them, just to get you your posting. You should bloody well trust me to have your backs by now, don't you think?"

Porthos had the decency to look halfway ashamed, but the tension visibly tautening his muscles did not ease. "Alrigh'," he grumbled. "You'll stay in touch, won't you. Please?"

"Don't go anywhere near their flats. They've been cleared, just as a precaution. There's a hotel on Liverpool Street where you can stay until we’ve started to sort things out."

He grabbed Porthos's arm, then, stopping the big man from disappearing too quickly back into the alleyway. "It's not going well," he said, as gently as he could manage. "If I only have enough pull to get one of them back, which is it to be?"

Porthos stared at him, in what Treville realized was – perhaps for the very first time – pure, unadulterated terror. "Jesus  _fuck,_ " he snarled finally, and ripped his arm out of Treville's grip, putting one hand over his mouth and shuddering once, hard, with distress. 

"I need an answer."

Porthos wiped the same hand over his eyes, sniffed, and looked down at the ground. "Aramis."

Treville nodded. "Because you're lovers?" There was no judgment in his question, just a sincere desire, he told himself, to go back to his telephone with all the facts at his fingertips.

Porthos managed to nod and shake his head all at once, miserably. "Him, at least, I know how to fix."

 _You do yourself a disservice,_ Treville thought to himself, as Porthos turned and, head tucked low and eyes scanning ceaselessly for threats and tails, disappeared down the alley. He went back into the Circus with a renewed sense of purpose, and started sprinkling his hard Russian phrases with ultimatums. He was running out of time.

Two days of negotiations and sleeplessness later, they had a result, and it was more than he could have hoped for. He called in a favor from the Americans, assembled a great pile of chickenfeed to send to their Neighbors along with the details of a few networks that could be spared in Hungary – he would be sure to get word to the participants, and travel papers, before the Russians swooped in on them – and the handover was completed on a quiet mountain road in Switzerland, from ambulance to ambulance. He left the details of where Athos and Aramis had been taken on a scrap of paper at the hotel on Liverpool Street, and then, four days after that, having warned off the inquisitors in no uncertain terms, he drove alone up to a tiny village in Norfolk, where all the houses were old enough to have names, and found Porthos sitting still and stone-like on a bench just outside the door of a pretty little Tudor cottage, an empty beer bottle at his feet.

Treville got out of his car slowly, slammed the door firmly to make sure Porthos was aware of his presence, and, his hands in his coat pockets, stood quietly by the scalper as he ran his hands over his face, and blinked several times.

“How bad?” Treville asked finally.

Porthos made a noncommittal sound deep in his throat. “Aramis’s hands are ruined, but they’ll heal.”

“And Athos?”

“Won’t walk again,” Porthos rumbled. “Not without a cane, anyway. Broke his leg in five places.”

Treville nodded, and ducked his way into the house, leaving Porthos sitting motionless amongst the garden’s flowers, swaying in the summer wind. The house was dark and cool, low-ceilinged, and in the kitchen Treville met Aramis for the first time in person, as he fumbled his bandaged hands around a glass of whisky.

“Sir,” Aramis said, bobbing his head. He was bright-eyed and alert, Treville saw with satisfaction, and yes, as Porthos said, he would heal – his fingernails would grow back, and the bones would set. “I know you’ve – done a lot for us, already. But – ”

“Spit it out, man,” Treville sighed. Athos, he noticed, was nowhere to be seen.

Aramis looked down at the table. “There’s a girl in Istanbul. Austrian.” His voice fell an octave. “Got her pregnant. She doesn’t deserve to be taken up by the Russkies on my account.”

Treville closed his eyes. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said eventually, tonelessly, wondering if that phrase would be engraved on his tombstone. “Name?”

“Anne Hapsburg.” Aramis paused, and his head sank lower. “Porthos doesn’t know.”

“Best he doesn’t,” Treville said, agreeing to something unspoken, as he turned away from Aramis and headed for the door to the sitting room, thinking Anne, Annes, why was it always an Anne?

“Be gentle,” he thought he heard Aramis say behind him as he stepped through the low doorway, and he had every intention of being so as he saw Athos lying on the careworn sofa in front of the fireplace, a half-empty bottle of brandy cradled in the crook of his elbow, a cigarette in his other hand which he had let burn into ash down to the butt. His left leg was encased in white plaster up to the hip, and the skin around his eyes was red and chapped from the tracks of tears which, Treville knew from experience, were not the evidence of emotion, but simply the body’s reaction to extreme pain. Treville hesitated in the doorway, for Athos’s eyes were shut and he was breathing deep and evenly, and the older spy had no desire to rob him of any moment of peace. He said Athos’s name quietly, once and then twice, and, receiving no answer, turned to leave.

“There’s always someone in the room,” Athos mumbled suddenly, breaking the silence like a whip-crack, and Treville turned around to see him staring up at the ceiling, his grip on the bottle of brandy tightening into white knuckles. “There’s always someone just sitting there, watching,” he said again, hardly louder than a whisper, and Treville thought suddenly back to the damp interrogation room at Sarratt, and the girl sitting in the corner reading her paper and obscenely popping bubble gum in her cheek.

“She was there.” Athos turned his head, looked straight at Treville, his eyes still leaking involuntary tears. “She blew Istanbul.”

“I want to go with them,” Porthos said, as Treville came back outside and blinked into the weak, English summer sun. The scalphunter was standing firm at the garden gate, arms crossed and hands jammed into his pits, not quite blocking Treville’s path. “You’re gonna retire them, aren’t you?”

“If Aramis so wishes,” Treville nodded. “He’s young enough to get out now without too much trouble. And yes, Athos will be going into quarantine as soon as I finish the paperwork.”

 _Quarantine_ , he thought – the one thing that every agent feared more than death. The enforced separation from one’s friends, one’s peers, the new unfamiliar name and the new unfamiliar life, being told that they should forget everything they had ever done for their country, that they should wipe their minds clean, go away, disappear, was too much to bear for most. Somehow, though, he thought that for Athos, this exile would come as a relief.

“I want to go with them,” Porthos said again, stubborn and angry, and Treville hated himself for what he said next. 

“Alright. If you do one more mailfist job for me, I’ll let you go.”

Porthos was still for a moment, and then, guessing Treville’s intention, physically recoiled, his hands curling into tight fists at his sides. “No. I won’t hurt him like that.”

“I rather think,” Treville said as he buttoned up his coat and stepped past Porthos out of the gate to where his car was parked, “that he’s been hurt enough. Don’t you?”

The news came through to the Circus less than a week later, found in worried whispers and flutters of tired alarm in various intercepted Russian cables. Anne, then de Winter, formerly de la Fère, née de Breuil, was dead, her delicate neck gently snapped as she sat on a bench on the ferry crossing from Thessaloniki to Corfu. It had taken hours before anyone even noticed that the pretty woman sitting slumped among the crowds was anything other than asleep. And when Porthos returned from the Mediterranean a few days later via black routes through Ireland, he came directly to Treville’s flat, totally disregarding the presence of babysitters much like himself hurriedly calling his presence in to the Circus, and handed Treville a microdot he’d found in Anne’s compact. It contained a letter, signed by an assigned codename that Treville recognized with horrified satisfaction.

The Minister’s face drained of all color when he showed him the evidence – a letter from ‘The Cardinal.’ Richelieu quietly disappeared into the bowels of Sarratt, and Treville, once again, was left with the task of rebuilding his Service’s tattered reputation, especially with their American Cousins; the only consolation was that this time it was Westminster’s cockup, not his, and he had free rein to consolidate his resources while Whitehall clucked and panicked.

A few weeks into this quiet, heads-below-the-parapet period, one of the housekeepers brought Treville an update on a certain reptile fund that was for his eyes only. A house, it emerged, had been purchased in Oxford, and a silver Aston Martin DB5; the detached cottage had two bedrooms, and, judging by the list of purchases, the shelves in its sitting room were being steadily filled with nineteenth-century collections of French literature, fine Italian and German wines had been bought in bulk for the kitchen, and a top-of-the-range gun safe had been purchased for the cellar.

Treville smiled to himself, handed back the file, and told the housekeeper to carry on.

*

“The wave of angry doubt which had swept over him, and ever since had pulled against his progress like a worrying tide, drove him now on to the rocks of despair, and then to mutiny: I refuse. Nothing is worth the destruction of another human being. Somewhere the path of pain and betrayal must end. Until that happened, there was no future: there was only a continued slide into still more terrifying visions of the present.”

John le Carré, _Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy_

*

[  
](http://i.imgur.com/dVQ6IjU.jpg)"The Cardinal" by [JakartaInn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn). Click for full-size.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **ETA: this AU now has an amazing video trailer, made by[Sam Hawke](http://samhawke.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr. Watch it [here!](http://samhawke.tumblr.com/post/85517743556/such-labour-like-the-spider-s-web)**
> 
> **A/Ns:** Not much to note this time other than that the historical framing was of [the failed coup attempt on General de Gaulle’s government](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_putsch_of_1961) by anti-communist generals in 1961, and the eventual [signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_Test_Ban_Treaty) in 1963, which restricted global nuclear testing to underground sites. Porthos is obviously a figure for Ricki Tarr, at least a little; Richelieu is the equivalent of a Lacon, and Treville can be seen as a combination of Control and Smiley; the injuries Athos and Aramis suffer are inspired by Jim Prideaux’s woes in the book, and Smiley’s story about Karla in the film. Sorry if this was confusing and esoteric – but we hope Le Carré fans will have found it satisfactory! Title from Spenser’s _Amoretti_ , Sonnet 23:
> 
> PENELOPE for her _Vlisses_ sake,  
>  Deuiz'd a Web her wooers to deceaue:  
> in which the worke that she all day did make  
> the same at night she did againe vnreaue.  
> Such subtile craft my Damzell doth conceaue,  
> th' importune suit of my desire to shonne:  
> for all that I in many dayes doo weaue,  
> in one short houre I find by her vndonne.  
> So when I thinke to end that I begonne,  
> I must begin and neuer bring to end:  
> for with one looke she spils that long I sponne,  
> & with one word my whole years work doth rend.  
> Such labour like the Spyders web I fynd,  
> whose fruitlesse worke is broken with least wynd.
> 
> **ETA:** Sorry for all the broken links in these chapter notes, everyone! Didn't notice until 12+ hours after posting that my C &P-ing from Word had somehow stripped out the urls. Should be all fixed now. 


	3. The Contemplation of Whose Heavenly Hue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 3: Artist!Athos AU - it starts with Porthos being concerned for the mystery man who lives in the apartment above the restaurant; it ends with a Banksy in Brooklyn, a feisty gallery owner and her much-younger boyfriend, a show called MUSE, and Aramis all caught up in it all the way through. **Warnings:** drug and alcohol abuse, undercurrents of abusive relationships.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So she’s gonna kill me for keeping this secret from her, but this AU is both inspired by and a gift for [JakartaInn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn) – because she is so generally awesome to me and to many others in the fandom, and it was her idea, even if she was tipsy at the time. ;-) I know fuck all about being an artist so I just sort of threw everything in here that I could surmise from experience and research – I just hope it hits vaguely close to some mark!

_graphic by akathecentimetre_

*

  **I.**

“When you have this powder all ready, get six ounces of pine resin from the druggists, three ounces of gum mastic, and three ounces of new wax, for each pound of lapis lazuli; put all of these things into a new pipkin, and melt them up together. Then take a white linen cloth, and strain these things into a glazed washbasin. Then take a pound of this lapis lazuli powder, and mix it all up thoroughly, and make a plastic of it, all incorporated together. And have some linseed oil, and always keep your hands well greased with this oil, so as to be able to handle the plastic.”

_\- Cennino Cennini on grinding paints, late 14 th century_

Porthos had never considered himself that much of a do-gooder. He preferred to think of his drive to generally be helpful as a basic requirement of being a decent human being, and lived his life accordingly. He worked late, beating dough until midnight so it was ready to slowly rise overnight; he took over cleaning when his fellow cooks were sick or running off to get married or just being assholes, and took pleasure in the satisfaction of a job well done and the credit for it falling onto his shoulders. He was a bloody good chef in his own right, too, and the pressure of making a classic Italian _trattoria_ a success in the seething ethnic pot that was New York was a challenge he relished.

That being said, he was a busy man, and one of simple tastes and routines, which meant that his world had – happily, he might add – shrunk to within the confines of the cramped restaurant on West 9th Street, and it was rare that his attention wandered beyond it. Which was why it was odd to everyone, including himself, when he started to realize that he had never seen the occupant of the apartment at the top of the stairs right above _La Guarnigione_ , and, more importantly, given Porthos’s occupation, he had never seen whoever it was who lived there either bring home groceries or order takeout.

This, given how fucking good he knew his food was, and how much food in general was fucking fantastic, was not to be borne. He left the first container of food outside the stranger’s door on a whim, late on an evening when it was one a.m. and they were all yawning through closing up, and there were several helpings of _cozze alla marinara_ left on one of the stoves. If it turned out the apartment was empty, after all, he’d simply pick it up again later and throw it away.

He’d forgotten all about it by the next evening, when, in the middle of layering a _parmigiana_ , his boss came scurrying into the loud, hot, always chaotic kitchen and pulled at Porthos’s elbow. “What did you do?” he bellowed over the din.

“I dunno, what did I do?” Porthos asked carelessly, shutting the oven door with a snap.

“Our landlord’s here, and says he wants to see you!”

Porthos had never met this supposed landlord, and so it was only with a great deal of grumbling that he was coaxed out to the bar, where a slim, tousle-haired stranger, dressed in jeans and a button down that had seen better days, was doodling on his cocktail napkin with a felt-tip pen. If Porthos were the sort of person to jump to uncharitable conclusions, he would have thought that he was also seriously hungover.

“Mr. De la Fère, this is Porthos,” the manager said ingratiatingly.

“Pleasure, I’m sure,” the man said, and shook Porthos’s hand firmly. Something in his expression turned slightly into flint, and Porthos heard his boss squeak and retreat, leaving them both in relative peace and quiet.

“I’m actually just Athos,” De la Fère said as Porthos slid onto the barstool next to him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause a scene.”

“No worries,” Porthos said, relaxing a little as Athos signaled with two fingers to the bartender, and two red sangrias slid down the polished bartop towards them. “I hope there isn’t anything wrong?”

“Not at all,” Athos said, with a quirk of a smile pulling at his lips; he was still doodling absentmindedly on the napkin with his free hand, though Porthos couldn’t make out what he was drawing. “I just heard you were the one who brought me that amazing meal, and I wanted to thank you. And start a tab, to make up for the expense,” he added dryly, looking down into what was suddenly his empty glass.

“Hey, if you’re the landlord, it’s the least I could do,” Porthos grinned. “What do you do for a living?”

Something like a laugh started in Athos’s chest, and he looked Porthos up and down with what looked like sudden fondness. “I’m an artist. Or I was. That always sounds so pretentious.”

“Well _I_ ,” said Porthos, finishing his drink and standing, wiping down his palms on his jeans, “am a culinary genius, and mind you don’t forget it. Y’can come down anytime y’like.”

“I just might,” Athos said quietly, and, quickly standing too, he balled up the napkin, tossed it onto the bar, and, a little awkwardly, but not a little charming, bowed his head. “Until next time.”

He slid past Porthos and out the side door of the restaurant into the stairwell, leaving Porthos shaking his head with bemused satisfaction. He picked up the napkin and unfolded it, then, just out of curiosity, and was completely stunned by the sight of himself smiling radiantly out of a crumpled corner, rendered in perfect shades of black, all dimpled cheeks and sharp eyes.

“Hot damn,” he murmured.

* 

They settled into a routine without even needing to discuss it; Athos paid for his drinks during happy hour down at the bar, but the food Porthos brought upstairs for both of them after closing was free. They sat in the stairwell to eat, most nights, both because Porthos was usually too tired to climb all the way up the flight to the second floor and because he had no desire to intrude upon what Athos intimated was his studio, and a jealously guarded studio at that. They didn’t even feel the need to talk very often; it was enough to nod and smile at each other over the Styrofoam containers, for Athos to gently nudge Porthos awake from his food coma and shepherd him down the stairs.

During the day, Porthos realized that he had seen Athos many times before they’d met, and simply not noticed him. Or rather, he’d heard footsteps above his head, sometimes, through the ceiling of the kitchen; he’d seen a figure sprawled in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs before, once, when he was making his way home in winter and in the dead of night; he’d seen a dark-haired man make regular trips to the coterie of West Village drug dealers who frequently staked their territory on the other side of the narrow street. To realize that all of these people were one and the same, and were contained in the mild-mannered, usually thoughtful, supremely talented man he was only just starting to get to know was startling, and concerned him.

Athos noticed said concern, too, especially when Porthos started nudging him to eat more, or to persuade him to stay longer in the bar rather than vanishing upstairs to drink alone in the hours before Porthos joined him. Unfortunately, he also perfected just the right expression to tell Porthos, in no uncertain terms, that although he was appreciated, loved, even, he needed to back the fuck off. It was a peculiar look on Athos’s face; the small smile at the edges of his mouth and his eyes slightly narrowed, affection suffused through his touch in the moment before he shoved Porthos into his coat and out onto the sidewalk.

The first night that he climbed the stairs and didn’t find Athos waiting, in February, and got no answer to his knock on the paint-peeled door, he just shrugged, left the food as he had done once before, and stumble yawning out into the night and the subway home to Harlem. The second time, he knocked, waited, hesitated, and tried the doorknob far too gingerly; it wasn’t locked, but it needed a good shove to open it, and when he found Athos sitting helplessly in the shattered remnants of what looked like an entire case of wine, he just swore, dumped the food in the cluttered fridge, and waded into the fray, nudging aside an easel in the dark so he could swing Athos’s slight frame up into his arms and stagger them both into the adjoining bedroom.

Porthos stayed on the couch, and, waiting blearily for the coffee to brew in a pot on the stove the next morning, he wandered quietly through the studio, which was lit by a huge single window that must have sat just above the restaurant front – he wondered at the fact that he had never noticed it before – its glass scraped every once in a while by branches from one of the few trees on the block. The walls were white and pristine, the floor (even once he cleaned up the broken glass) less so, spattered as it was with drips of colors Porthos couldn’t even begin to name, and various easels, paints, jars, or misshapen blocks of stone stacked everywhere. There was a phone, but no computer; a wallet lying open on the kitchen counter, but no keys that Porthos could see. Athos’s apology, when he woke, was quiet and guilty, and as he stood in the doorway to the bedroom in his rumpled jeans and a t-shirt from a college Porthos had never heard of, he looked, more than anything, exhausted.

Porthos went back downstairs, let himself into the restaurant several hours before opening time; sat in the dark, and, suddenly, with all the certainty of a college student in over his head and seeking reassurance, wanted a drink.

* 

He’d met Aramis at Stonewall, of all places, as clichéd a meeting as one could imagine for two gay men looking for their clan and overwhelmed with their newfound freedom, soon after moving to the City. They’d gone home together, fucked, fucked a few more times the next day, and then, delighted with each other – Porthos loved how handsome Aramis was, how carefree, how vaguely exciting in ways he couldn’t define – they’d settled cheerfully into a friendship where they could do whatever the hell they wanted, however frequently or infrequently they wanted. Over the years, that usually meant that Aramis, in between the modeling jobs he often got, but rarely kept, showed up at the restaurant with his gorgeous smile and charmed his way into several nights of maître d’ work at a time, pulling in customers like nobody’s business; and when they did fuck, it was all the more relaxed and satisfying for the fact that it had been a while, in the certain knowledge that they could pick up again whenever they wanted.

Inevitably, Aramis slept with yet another boss or coworker or rich backer he wasn’t supposed to, and he showed up in March with that familiar sheepish grin and more stubble than usual, ambling into the kitchen whenever it wasn’t busy up front to chat to Porthos and steal titbits from his pans and saucers no matter how quick Porthos was to beat him off with the closest wooden spoon; and it was then that they got talking about the fact that Porthos was busy after his shifts most nights, now, and that there wasn’t even any sex in it, and what sort of friendship was that, let alone a relationship?

“Is he blind, or something?” Aramis said, pinching one of Porthos’s massive arms. “He must be, not to want to tap this.”

“He’s not like that,” Porthos grumbled good-naturedly. “And neither am I. Have a drink with us, you’ll like him.”

He wasn’t sure why, but he almost found himself regretting it, the next night, when Aramis’s smile turned instantly predatory as soon as Athos came in from the stairs, and Athos seemed suddenly struck dumb by his presence – which, to be fair, was a fairly typical reaction to Aramis under any circumstances, but which made worry and unease curl unexpected and cold in Porthos’s chest.

“Drop by, if you have some free time,” Athos said to Aramis after several drinks, which Porthos realized later he had probably consumed just to work up the courage to say such a thing, to extend an invitation which had never seemed necessary to maintain the friendship between him and Porthos. “I’d like to draw you.”

“Sounds fun,” Aramis smirked, and Porthos’s heart sank.

 

*

  **II.**

“ _Michiel Agnolo Caravaggio_ zeyde, dat alle Schildery _Bagatelli_ , kinderwerk en bezeuling was, wiens werk het ook zijn mocht, die niet na’t leven geschildert was. Vermits ‘er niets beter, niets goet, als alleen de natuer te volgen zijn kan. Des wegen schilderde hy noit streek anders, als na ‘t leven.”

_Caravaggio claims that all paintings, to be worthy, must be created ‘from life’ or ‘from nature.’_

\- _Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1678_

  

The door was waiting open when Aramis climbed the stairs, scraping his hair back from his face and mussing it at the nape of his neck. It was early, several hours before he was due to be back downstairs, and there was the smell of cheap coffee wafting out from somewhere as he tapped his knuckles on the doorframe and stepped inside.

Athos was standing by the window, a half-empty glass of wine in his hand, which would have been alright had it not been only just past eleven. “Good,” he said, looking Aramis up and down, taking in the relatively form-fitting jeans and the flannel shirt which Aramis knew made him look like he was fresh out of Oregon (it was a good look on him, or at least, so he had been told – frequently). “Whenever you’re ready, we’ll start.”

“How do you want me?” Aramis said, feeling relaxed and flirtatious in the late morning sun as it spread warmly across the floor, dropping his bag next to the sofa.

“Anywhere and anyhow you like,” Athos replied, draining the glass and setting it down on the windowsill as he moved over to a scattered circle of supplies he’d laid out on the floor – pads of paper, pens, graphite – and settled cross-legged in the middle of them. “First day. I’ll just be observing you, how you move, how you work.”

Before he knew it, it was three hours later, and Aramis was waking with a start from the doze he’d fallen into on the sofa, yawning and lifting his arm from where it had fallen towards the ground so he could wipe sleep from his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he sighed. “Late night…”

Athos paid him not the slightest bit of attention, his head still bowed over his sketchpad; after a moment, Aramis got up, stretched his legs out to either side, and ambled off to the bathroom, where, in place of a cheerful seascape or poster of random animals he saw, tucked away behind the one handtowel in its hook on the wall, a water-stained portrait of one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen.

“Who’s that portrait of? In the bathroom?”

Athos paused in his sketching, very studiously did not look at Aramis, and then, after a long moment, kept on working. “My ex.”

“And you decided to put her portrait in the toilet? Harsh. Or, you know, perfect,” Aramis said, sinking back down onto the couch and stretching out again.

“There was a hook,” Athos said vaguely, and, looking around the studio and noticing for the first time that there was absolutely nothing hung up on the walls, Aramis couldn’t help but laugh. He was starting to be far too easily charmed.

During their second session, he stood cross-armed in front of the window, eyes closed, letting sunlight play across his face. In the third, he took his shirt off, utterly at ease as he always was with the concept of showing skin before strangers – working in the fashion industry either exacerbated or totally destroyed one’s sense of bodily shame, and thankfully for him it had been the latter – and padded around the kitchen, doing a few dishes, looking through cupboards, feeling with pleasure the heat of Athos’s eyes on the planed lines of his spine.

He liked being looked at like this, he discovered. He liked being looked at as though he was the beginning and end of something, as though his body could contain multitudes of forms as they spilled out in Athos’s chalk and then, later, his paints. He tried to walk over and look at himself blooming across the paper and canvas, sometimes, but Athos would merely lift his head and stare at him, stopping him in his tracks until he sheepishly backed away.

He started wandering in at all hours, day and night, sometimes taking five minute breaks from his shift in the restaurant to run up the stairs and, always finding the door open, strike a mocking pose as soon as he got inside, or, if Athos wasn’t at his work, creeping through the apartment to find him until their eyes met and they simply acknowledged each other’s presence. Some of these occasions brought Aramis a sort of lingering peace that lasted the entire evening; others brought him low, like when he found Athos asleep with empty bottles littering the kitchen, or the single time when, silent in the studio and not stepping out of the light, he watched Athos do a line of something off of the white porcelain of the bathroom sink.

He confronted Porthos about it, once, and was only disappointed when he saw the big man’s face fall a little. “You knew?”

Porthos shrugged uncomfortably as he turned back to his stove. “It’s his life, man. Only so much I felt I should say. Everything alright? With you two, I mean?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Less than a week later, Aramis went upstairs after his shift, turned on the light in the studio, and found Athos sitting on the floor, staring at a wall as though it would yield him an answer to something. He turned where he sat, and watched as Aramis closed the door behind him and took off his shirt. He peeled off the undershirt, kicked off his shoes and socks and left them in a pile by the door; he took down the fly of his jeans, let it hang open and the waistband slip an inch, and then walked over to Athos and pulled him to his feet.

“This isn’t a good idea,” Athos said lowly, trying to look serious even as his eyes darkened; he was drunk, it was clear, but not to the point of losing his senses. “I don’t like getting too involved in my art. It doesn’t end well.”

“As if,” Aramis said, and leaned in to nip and bite at the lobe of Athos’s ear, to trail kisses down his neck. “You can’t function without me. Your _art_ needs me.”

“You have no idea how wrong you are,” Athos whispered; but he groaned nonetheless, and buried his head in Aramis’s neck, his hands coming up sharply to grip at Aramis’s hips and pull them into his own. They stumbled to the sofa together, tumbled down onto it, and Aramis found it easy to press Athos down into the cushions, to fuck their hips together with his hand slid in between them until Athos’s stopped breathing and arched up into him, the two of them collapsing together in a sticky mess. Athos was warm, nearly feverish, and Aramis felt wrapped up by him as they fell asleep.

When he woke up the next morning it felt freeing, even given his previous routines, to walk around the apartment nude after his shower. Athos didn’t take his eyes off of him, though he himself was damp but dressed as he sat at his easel, one bare foot folded over the other.

“Like this?” Aramis said, grinning, and he sat down still buck-naked on the floor and leaned back against the side of the sofa, spreading his arms out wide.

“Sure,” Athos said dryly. He sounded happy but wary, as though he didn’t trust himself to speak to Aramis about anything anymore. “Some new anatomy to practice.”

“I could be your muse,” Aramis said suddenly, voicing an idea which had been sneakily nagging at him ever since he’d woken up. “I like the sound of that, actually.” He grinned and flopped onto his back, feeling far too enthusiastic about life in general; then again, sex tended to do that to him. “You’ve already got your little garret, here – and I’ll come in and out of your life like a hurricane, provoking you to greater and greater heights. Though we’ll have to do something about your habits, darling; such a prize as me cannot be seen to be associating with your sort of lowlife, even if you are talented.”

Athos snorted from behind the canvas, and Aramis couldn’t tell if he was horrified or amused. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t play at being coy,” Aramis teased, rolling over and propping his head up on one arm so he was on full display. “You know you want to drive yourself to distraction over me.”

“Right,” Athos growled. He put down his brush very carefully, stalked over to Aramis, and, without further preamble, grabbed him by the cock.

“Let’s get a few things straight,” he continued, not entirely unpleasantly, as Aramis choked happily on air and, letting his head fall back into his hand, let slip a groan as Athos’s hand started to stroke him roughly into full hardness. “You do not get to call yourself my ‘muse’ in my presence. You are not the light of my life, nor do I intend to go mad for you. You will not look at my work unless I give you permission to do so; you are a model, and, at this point, a passable lay. You are _not_ here,” and here a note of sadness pressed his voice quieter, which gave Aramis hope – “to _fix_ me. Let’s just keep things the way they are, if you please. Do I make myself clear?”

Aramis summoned up his cheekiest grin – which in truth wasn’t all that difficult, because this was all fucking hilarious and exactly the sort of completely insincere denial he had hoped for – and nodded. “If you say so.”

“Good,” Athos said, and, bending down, proceeded to take Aramis in his mouth and suck him until Aramis nearly passed out with bliss.

“Mm,” Athos said after he swallowed, pressing a last obscene lick to the dip of Aramis’s hip. “I should have filmed that. They’d call me the new Warhol.”

Aramis stared up at the ceiling, panting, and nearly purred with delight. He could get very, very used to this.

 

*

  **III.**

“For several years, having nothing to roof over my kilns, I was every night at the mercy of rains and winds, with no succor, aid or consolation, except for the owls hooting on one side and the dogs howling on the other; sometimes winds and storms sprang up which blew so hard over and under my kilns that I was forced to leave everything, losing my labor; and it happened often that having left everything without a dry rag on me, because of the rains that had fallen, I went to bed at midnight or at dawn, dressed like a man who has been dragged through all the mud holes of the city; and in retiring thus, I stumbled about without light, and falling on one side or another, like a drunkard, filled with great sadness: because after having worked a long time I saw my labor lost. Now, in retiring thus dirty and wet, I would find in my bedroom a second persecution worse than the first, which makes me wonder now that I did not die of sadness.”

_\- Bernard Palissy, 1580_

It was extremely easy, at the beginning, to worship Aramis.

Athos knew himself to be driven by sight; by the potential of new forms and shapes, colors, the interplay of light. He drank partly to see what happened to formerly-straight lines on the edges of his peripheral vision as it blurred; he sometimes used needles just to see previously-unknown shapes explode behind his eyelids. He was an aesthete and unashamed in his pursuit of beauty, no matter how much he knew that it could just as easily destroy him as it built him up.

At the beginning, Aramis, the shape of him, the sight of him clothed or unclothed in Athos’s lines of vision, was more than enough. He was quite happy to watch Aramis talk without listening to what he was saying; to watch him sleep, eat, laugh with Porthos, observing the movement of muscles, the way the scar on his forehead showed in different gradations of color in natural and artificial light.

It became dangerous when he realized that he had allowed entirely different senses, ones he had been so careful to exclude from his life, back into it: touch, and taste, and smell.

It hadn’t even started with Aramis. Porthos had unwittingly drawn him into it, not realizing truly how little Athos had cared about what his body was running on, thinking that it was entirely natural to flood anyone’s head with dizzying flavors and smiles one could get drunk off of, not to realize the potential inherent in an arm around Athos’s shoulders, the casually dropped compliment.

Aramis was a very different proposition, but the principle remained the same. The sensation of skin against skin was not one Athos could forget, though he had tried; the insistence of it, though, the practiced ease of falling into a routine where he _missed_ , where he _wanted_ , where he sat doing nothing for the first time in months, just whiling away the time until there was a knock at his door and he pulled Aramis into him by his beltloops, overwhelmed him as much as it became everyday.

He bought, for a modest investment, several pounds of Andean lapis lazuli gems, spent several days grinding them into powder on a whetstone, and marveled at the depth of color they produced. He stretched his own canvases for the first time in years, and felt sixteen again; he walked the few avenues and blocks to a hardware store to run his hands through tubs full of cool metal, hanging fabrics, rubbed a layer of skin off of his fingertips with sandpaper. He walked through the Village at three in the morning and came back with a little bag of chewable leaves, sat and stared at the blank white wall, and watched spiraling, terrifying colors bloom across it; when Aramis found him and scraped the wad of salvia out of his mouth he was sweating and shaking as though he’d run a marathon, and the hands on the clock had only moved forward five minutes rather than the hours he thought he had been sitting there, frozen in his terror.

He grew used to the feeling of Aramis’s hands in his hair as he trailed his mouth down Aramis’s stomach; to the noises he himself made when, sated, Aramis put on that characteristic grin, pressed Athos into the sofa and, taking advantage of his exhaustion, wrung his pleasure from him so slowly that he was incapable of any sort of expression for hours. Kissing him was an exercise in the obliteration of anything but the present, of anything but the two of them wedged together in Athos’s narrow bed, kept close for warmth as the New York winter started to ease until Athos grew hot enough that he tried to twist away, and was pulled back to be kissed until he forgot where and who he was.

That blankness, and the devotion which created it, frightened him when he took the time to think about it. It happened infrequently at first, then more and more often, as Aramis started to look at him with something of possession and pride in his face, something of a smugness which was integral to his character and to how he treated Athos as a lover, and so confining.

It came to a head as Athos was beginning to suspect it would, on an evening when Aramis spent an unusually long time in the bathroom as Athos was finishing his day’s work, and when he set down his brush and finished wiping his fingers clean he turned into Aramis’s hands on his hips, and the sofa (that damn sofa – he would have to burn it) was only a few stumbling steps away. Aramis’s legs wrapped around his waist and held him there as he stripped them both, drew Athos in with kisses until he was breathless and groaning into Aramis’s shoulder at the discovery that there had been a reason Aramis had spent so long in the ensuite, that there were already streaks of lube on the insides of his thighs.

“Look at me,” Aramis said, with his hands firm around the edges of Athos’s face and their foreheads touching, his eyes half-open. He kept saying it: look at me, _look_ at me, with the obvious and visible knowledge of how he was taking Athos to pieces.

Afterwards, with Aramis sleeping splayed out and smiling, Athos paced, feeling like his every nerve-ending had been exposed to the air, raw and directionless. He sat in the bedroom, stared at the walls, told himself not to be such an adolescent that he had to let this step mean a damn thing. His mind itched, and by morning he needed something to quiet it; Aramis found him there in the bathroom at eight, throwing the disposable needle into the trash, and right then, in the sudden sharpening of Aramis’s eyes, Athos knew what was about to happen, and found he welcomed the simplicity of it.

“God damn you,” Aramis muttered, angry, Athos knew, but he was already withdrawing, telling himself that he could replace this feeling, he _could_. “What do I have to do?” Aramis asked, as he followed Athos back out into the studio. “What do I have to _do_ to get a response out of you?”

He turned around, pushed them both up against the wall, rested his hand against the base of Aramis’s throat. “What wouldst thou have, my muse?” he murmured, the rush in his veins turning him poetic. “Should I scream your name to the skies? Should I throw us both off a cliff?” He leaned in close to Aramis’s ear, felt the rage in him that was so close to doing Athos harm. “Should I take another mistress and discard you, and leave you to waste? Should I _beat_ you, to show you how much I love you?”

Aramis wanted to kiss him, he could sense it in the sudden tense of muscles beneath his arm, to try and placate away what he thought was something else’s influence; he stepped back, let a vacuum rush between them, and crossed his arms against his chest. “Get out.”

Something in Aramis went boneless with surprise, and he sagged further away. Athos felt the extra inch as though it was a mile. “What?”

“Get out.”

He turned away, walked into the bedroom and shut the door, knowing full well both that Aramis would be gone by the time he came back out if only to save his own feelings, and that he himself could not bear the sight of him leaving. Half an hour later, he emerged into the empty studio, put on his jacket, went down the stairs and across the street; his dealer was on the corner, his faithful man, and did not blink at his sudden desire to have a supply that would get him through several days rather than just one night.

When he came back to himself a week later – according to his phone, which held no calls or texts in store – delirious with hunger and his hands cramped into claws from the brushes, chisels, and knives, Aramis’s face stared down at him from every surface, in every color he had ever seen. The lapis lazuli had spilled, and hurt Athos’s eyes so much from where it lay in the sunlight on the hardwood floor that it was all he could do to roll over and go back to sleep.

He had been right all along. It was done.

 

*

  **IV.**  

“My villa is of a convenient size without being expensive to keep up. The courtyard in front is plain, but not mean, through which you enter porticoes shaped into the form of the letter D, enclosing a small but cheerful area between. These make a capital retreat for bad weather, not only as they are shut in with windows, but particularly as they are sheltered by a projection of the roof. From the middle of these porticoes you pass into a bright, pleasant inner court, and out of that into a handsome hall running out towards the seashore; so that when there is a south-west breeze, it is gently washed with the waves, which spend themselves at its base. On every side of this hall there are either folding-doors or windows equally large, by which means you have a view from the front and the two sides of three different seas.”

_\- Pliny the Younger, Letter to Gallus_

 

The broker had told her that it was prime territory, and indeed it was. 24th between 10th and 11th, next to the High Line; perfect, she had been told, for nabbing that artistically-inclined tourist or the type of New Yorker who made a habit out of being Seen. Gallery row, they had said, and indeed it was – except they had storefront whereas she had warehouse windows that had been bricked up (which at least gave her the small mercy of not having to look at the evidence of corporatism that made her fellow gallery owners wince as they hurried down the block in the shape of the Mini-Storage sign); she might have had skylights, filthy and industrial, which let down shafts of sooty light into the cavernous gallery space, but they had pieces actually visible from the street, and typography clear and deceptively modest on glass, whereas she had a door spray-painted ‘ENTER’ and a staircase which smelled like the dead, and, at one point or another, had probably housed more than a few of them.

She’d fallen in love with it, of course, because she was an idiot. And in the first heady year after her split from Jacques and her graduation with MBA and MFAs in hand and the consequences of shaky signatures on bank documents, Constance had almost – _almost –_ made it work. She’d gotten a show straight off, the sort of thing that included portraits painted in blood and resin splattered across her freshly-painted floors, and took full advantage of the light at dusk to scare you. She’d cleaned the stairwell herself, made d’Artagnan – whom she’d met in the worst sort of art student winebar during a fit of academic nostalgia and was entirely too fond of even before he’d started staying over at her apartment – climb up on the roof and wash all the skylights. She’d lined up something linear, something abstract, and then: nothing. She’d grabbed a traveling show of Dr. Seuss mannequins for a couple of weeks (a gimmick which kept her grinning all day but did nothing for her reputation), but after that it seemed only students were interested.

And they, she knew, as she sat at her desk in the corner of the warehouse and flipped through her latest missives from ConEd, wouldn’t pay the bills. “Hell,” she murmured to herself as she put her stockinged feet up on the desk and pinched the bridge of her nose, _they wouldn’t even pay for groceries._ The prospect of living in the gallery and putting what had previously been her rent money into her debts was becoming an ever more practical but intensely unappealing prospect.

The door to the gallery opened and slammed closed unexpectedly hard like it always did, heralding, in the quiet mid-afternoon hours, d’Artagnan’s arrival from classes – and that, at least, made her smile. He hated seeing her upset, but, thankfully, was equally able to comfort her when she was, and was never one to belittle her concerns when he saw them written on her face.

She’d had enough of _that_ with Jacques.

“I need a donut,” she called out, settling more deeply into her chair and crossing her ankles on the corner of the desk. “I hope you brought me one. Just as a matter of course.”

Only silence greeted her shout as it echoed through the columns and various hanging paintings, and she craned her head sideways to see someone standing facing away from her, looking with dark head tilted at one of the more ambitious pieces out of the current student’s efforts. It was a man, in a black trenchcoat, and, with hands in his pockets, he seemed as determined to ignore Constance’s presence as she had ignored his entrance.

“Shit,” she murmured, and leaned down to wriggle her feet back into her low heels. Standing up, she took a moment to straighten her skirt and tell her blush to back off before she tapped her way over to him. “Sorry about that, sir. Thought you were someone else.”

“That’s quite alright,” he said, still with head tilted at the painting. He paused a moment, and then frowned. It managed to look adorable. “What’s this supposed to be?”

“Uh – ” Constance peered at the label. “Self-portrait 3?”

“Poor them,” the man said seriously, and Constance couldn’t help but giggle. He turned to her, looking just as rumpled with his stubble and wrinkled collar as she felt, and something of a surge of recognition came over her, though she had no idea why. “Athos,” he said, reaching out a hand. “You have a lovely space here.”

“Thank you,” she said; his palm was very cold. “Constance Bonacieux, I’m the gallery owner.”

“Great light,” he said, craning his neck upwards at the skylights and squinting slightly. “And many combinations of layouts, I’m sure.”

“You bet,” she said, her business sense suddenly tingling. “Were you looking on behalf of a client?”

“No, for myself,” he said vaguely, and wandered a few steps from her, still looking up at the skylights, which had chosen that moment to let in a burst of spring sun, turning the bright white floor golden. “You need a show?”

“Always looking for shows,” she said, her heart hammering in her chest – something, something told her, beyond his age, that this was _not_ going to be just another student debacle. The sense of recognition was still pushing insistently at the edges of her consciousness, but the tip-of-the-tongue feeling was not yielding any answers.

“Good,” he said. He took a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Call anytime.”

He looked her up and down briefly, but not impolitely, and bowed his head to her, a slight smile pulling at the corner of his lip. “Until next time.”

Constance waited until the door had slammed closed behind him to flip over the card and read the name, and suddenly the world spun, and giddiness swept over her. d’Artagnan found her half an hour later still sitting shocked in the middle of the gallery floor, staring at the name typed out in red letters, and murmuring _Holy shit_ repeatedly under her breath.

*

She visited his studio just a week later, having left an extremely pouty (“But I want to see him!”) d’Artagnan in charge of the gallery for the evening not-rush, and took a deep breath in the stairwell after he buzzed her up just imbibing the incredible smell from the restaurant on the ground floor. When Athos greeted her at the door he looked much smaller and thinner than she had remembered, or perhaps as she had built him up in her head; the evidence of wine and cigarettes was all over the high-ceilinged apartment, but, thankfully, nothing worse that she could see, and so she stepped tentatively through the door with open eyes.

He let her wander through for a while, having left her shoes, coat and bag at the door, and she had to resist the urge to jump up and down at the idea that she, _she_ , Constance Bonacieux, was the first person who was getting to see – well, all of it. And was there ever a lot of it. Different styles, different sizes, a curator’s dream; and all themed so perfectly that she wondered whether he had been planning a retrospective rather than a return.

“So,” Athos said eventually, standing in the open kitchen in bare feet and lighting a cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth, “do you want them?”

“ _Do_ I,” she said delightedly. “Of course I do.”

“And do you want what comes with it?”

“Sorry?”

He took a meandering few steps into the studio space, one hand in a pocket. “This will be the biggest show of your career. Possibly ever.” There was no modesty in his tone, but then again, he was right. “Do you want this baggage?”

Constance frowned. “I don’t understand.”

He smiled, and there was something bleak in it which made her wonder what exactly had made him choose her. “I’m an alcoholic, drug addict, and generally unhealthy person to be around, Constance,” he said gently. “And forget about the subject matter – you know what this show means, what it will do. Are you sure you want to be associated with me?”

“For this?” she said, her mouth dry. She waved her hand, as though to take in every canvas, every panel. “Yes. And call me crazy, but I think I trust you not to sink me.”

“You’re too kind,” he replied slowly, and again she saw that assessing, approving look that he had given her in the gallery in his face. “One condition. You do no publicity whatsoever. We’ll install together, and then I’ll take care of getting the bodies in. Agreed?”

The request confused her, as it went against everything she’d ever been taught about marketing, but she found herself nodding anyway, because nothing about this whole experience was proving to be normal. “Sure thing.”

She went back down the stairs quietly, as though her very being was involved in the keeping of the secret; but it seemed she hadn’t been as unnoticed as she’d thought, because when she reached the sidewalk it was to the sight of a very big, very muscled – and very intimidating – man standing in front of her, arms crossed across his chef’s uniform and both eyebrows raised. “Hi,” he said, sounding not entirely friendly, and the snarl in his voice made her flinch. “How’s he doing?”

“Who, Athos?” Constance frowned, jutting out her chin. “Who wants to know?”

He squinted at her slightly, and then, shaking his head as though at himself, dropped the tough-man act, and his face crumpled. “Sorry, that was – ah, fuck. I’m Porthos,” he said, holding out his hands in a clear gesture of reconciliation. “He’s a friend of mine, sort of – I get worried, y’know?”

“Understandable,” she said wryly, and his eyes contracted again with anxiety, and flicked sideways at someone or something Constance couldn’t see in the restaurant.

“You’re not his girlfriend, are you?”

“God, no!” she burst out, finding the idea genuinely funny, and the entire conversation more and more bizarre. “We were just doing a little business.”

There was a yelp behind her, and a hand descended on her shoulder. “What sort of business?”

She spun around and slapped whoever it was before she got a good look at them – when she did, and he had stopped spluttering, and Porthos had stopped laughing, she found herself rooted to the spot.

She _knew_ this face, already, as though it was her own.

“What was that for?” the impossibly handsome man said plaintively, rubbing at his cheek, and she found herself breathless with outrage.

“Where do I even _start_?”

Porthos sat her down for a meal and free drinks as an apology for Aramis’s behavior, and, over tender mussels and an impeccably chosen Chianti, she listened, and caught her breath, and wondered how on earth she could have been so blind.

“I just – ” Aramis’s hair went all wild and wavy whenever he scraped his hands through it, which he had done frequently throughout the meal as Porthos kept a shoulder determinedly jammed into his to keep him grounded and communicated wordlessly with Constance over the breadbasket. “Man, I fucked up. I fucked us up. And I’m so worried that I fucked _him_ up, but then I think that _he was just fucked up_ and I had nothing to do with it – ”

“Slow down, man,” Porthos said, shaking his head and pouring another liberal helping of wine into Aramis’s glass. “You said he’s doing a show?” he asked Constance.

“Yeah,” she said, and barely restrained her own head from shaking at the thought that _they really didn’t know_. What could it be like, she wondered briefly, to not be involved with art?

“Good,” Aramis said. He alternated frequently between misery and a nettled, put-upon expression, as though everything was never his fault. “At least he’s working. That’s good, right?”

She left them still commiserating over a second bottle, and, as she allowed herself the small luxury of a taxi back to the gallery, started to think that maybe she had, indeed, gotten in too deep over her head.

*

It took the three of them the better part of a weekend to install the show. d’Artagnan and Athos had, curiously enough, bonded immediately once d’Artagnan had gotten over his initial dumb hero worship – which, given Athos’s impressive talents for self-deprecation, which Constance only realized later were calculated exactly to put both of them at ease – wasn’t difficult at all. They worked out a cataloguing system in a matter of minutes, heads close together over a pad of A4 paper, and then the work of rolling and packing and carrying had followed quickly after, stacks of canvas and wood gathered up in their similarly wiry, corded arms as they loaded everything in their rented U-Haul. It made her nervous, the casual way with which they touched and tossed around objects that Constance had come to view as priceless; but if it made them comfortable, she couldn’t find it in herself to protest.

She loved her gallery when it was stripped out and empty, newly retouched paint and swept corners waiting for new occupants. She and d’Artagnan always spent a few minutes between shows running around the space, screaming echoes up into the rafters just so they could listen to their voices bouncing off of the angles and unseen acoustic barriers, and this time was no exception; Athos watched them from the doorway, looking indecently amused, and Constance knew she was happier than she had been in a long time.

The whole process felt like something from school, as she pulled her hair back into a messy bun, dressed each morning in her tattiest jeans and croptops, and they hauled and hung and straightened and pinned, getting progressively sweatier and dirtier with paint-dust. The satisfaction of seeing it done, on the Sunday night, as they sprawled on the floor with the remnants of several six-packs of beer, left her feeling unbelievably peaceful.

“So,” d’Artagnan said eventually, rolling away from where he’d had an arm thrown over Constance’s waist, and pointing at the looming figures of the paintings in the dim light. “You know I have to ask. Who is that?”

Constance held her breath as Athos remained quiet for a long moment, looking down at his empty beer can from where he sat slouched up against Constance’s desk. “Honestly?” he said finally, “I don’t know.”

The silence lingered as the worry and embarrassment started to settle into d’Artagnan’s young face. Constance cleared her throat and sat up, feeling tipsiness trickle through her veins from the alcohol. “Okay, Mr. Recluse,” she said lightly, “how about this publicity then?”

“Ah,” Athos said, and, to her surprise, a wicked smile burst out on his lips. “Yes. That. d’Artagnan, stay here – we’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Constance blinked. “Huh?”

They took a cab to Red Hook, accompanied by a backpack that Athos had brought with him to the gallery, and were deposited on the corner of King and Van Brunt Streets; as the taxi rolled away and left them in darkness Constance started to wonder whether it had all been an elaborate ploy, and that she was about to be murdered and dismembered. It was that sort of place.

But then she saw the Banksy on the wall: a heart-shaped balloon, punctured and covered in healing duct tape, and Athos took a can of spray-paint out of the bag in full view of a security camera on the nearest telephone pole, and she nearly screamed.

“Oh, no,” she gasped, not sure if she wanted to run away or jump up and down with excitement. “Oh no, oh no – ”

 

* 

  **V.**

It happened so suddenly that it would have knocked Aramis for six even if he’d known beforehand that it was coming; the sight of Porthos hunched over a newspaper when he came in just before lunch, his mouth gaping open and his fingers halfway through texting someone as though in a blind panic, which didn’t make sense, because Porthos never panicked. He hesitated, too, before giving Aramis the paper – the Arts section of _The New York Times_ , as it turned out – which freaked Aramis out even more, and then he had to sit down hard, very hard, barely avoiding upsetting a newly-laid table.

His own face – _Aramis’s face_ – stared out at him, emerging phoenix-like from a tangled mess of graffiti paint, the barely-obscured heart behind it imprinted in what was now his cheek; and a single word scrawled neatly beneath it.

**_ANNOUNCEMENTS_ **

**_Critically-Acclaimed Recluse Announces His Gallery Return in Spectacular Fashion_ **

_Athos de la Fère, known to critics simply as La Fère, has long been one of the most sought-after and most mysterious talents on the New York contemporary art scene. Dedicated readers may remember this paper’s almost too-rapturous first review of his work, on show at the tender age of seventeen. Only one other show has appeared from his studio since, and that was five years ago. Nothing has been heard of him since then, save that he was alive, somewhere, until last night, when in typically idiosyncratic fashion he was caught on camera defacing a street mural by the internationally-infamous graffiti artist Banksy, in Red Hook. La Fère’s companion in crime – or, at least, his unwitting accomplice – was the apparent host of his new endeavor, Constance Bonacieux (above), whose gallery is located on West 24 th Street._

_In La Fère New York has a consummately focused and thorough creator whose work manages to bridge a gap so often bemoaned in modern art between meaning and presentation. Some have inevitably accused him of populism; many others, including this critic, find his relative honesty and simple, hard-hitting symbolism refreshing. His biography has been seamlessly integrated with his work in the past. His first show was unashamedly inspired by and in reaction to the passing of his parents, both wealthy socialites; ten years later, his second show heralded yet another dark turn as critics and the public alike flocked to see what was considered a violent and guiltily fascinating outpouring of grief at his separation from his then-wife, Anne de Breuil. The announcement of his new collection, MUSE, features the face of an unknown man; for the sake of this John Doe’s health and happiness, we can only hope that La Fère’s creative requirements have mellowed over the years._

_MUSE will be reviewed in tomorrow’s morning edition._

Constance looked stunned and stunning in the grainy security camera photo, unnamed but instantly recognizable; and below her there was a tiny thumbnail of a man who must have been Athos, except it couldn’t have been, because he was cleanshaven and unbearably young – only the familiar smirk told Aramis that what he was looking at was real, and actually happening, and brought him back to where Porthos was tapping his shoulder.

“Guessing you didn’t know either then, huh?” Porthos sighed.

The rest of the day passed in a blur, and with Aramis alternately wanting time to stop to give him some breathing room, and to go even faster so he would have an excuse to say that it was evening and he fancied walking fifteen blocks north to see the sights. Porthos begged off around five-thirty, spending some of his much-accumulated reserve of hours his boss owed him for every night and week he’d stayed late, and then, at six, he pulled them both out the door into the warm spring air and tugged a beanie out of his pocket, holding it out to Aramis with one eyebrow raised.

Aramis wanted to stuff his hands in his pockets and sulk like the child he knew he was. “Why should I wear that?”

“You wanna be recognized by everyone?” Porthos said, gentle but firm. “Even you aren’t that much of an exhibitionist, mate.”

Aramis took the hat reluctantly and rolled it down over the crown of his head as they turned and started to walk, tucking his hair behind his ears.

They were met at the top of the stairs into the gallery by a young man who started up from his ticket table at the sight of Aramis, squawked “ _Oh –_ wait, wait right there,” and hurried off to find Constance, who greeted them both with a warm and apologetic press of hands.

“You ready for this?” she said sympathetically, and at Aramis’s tight nod, she reached up to pull the beanie a little more firmly down over his forehead, and led them in.

Aramis had surmised early on, though he had never gotten close enough to see the details, that Athos’s style relied on stark colors and contrasts; that he made use of long, loose lines which always looked as though they had been done casually, crosshatches suggesting shadows and forms almost by accident. He had never expected, nor did he understand, even now (even after what that stranger, who knew nothing, had written in the paper) that what Athos did had been so personal, and that anyone else dared to understand its meaning besides its object.

Here, Aramis asleep, in one of the earliest chalk drawings, from that very first day, but redone in a royal blue so deep he couldn’t quite look at it, as though it was fluorescent. There, a self-portrait of Athos himself, with a hole burned right through the canvas so precisely as to have been done with acid, the slightest shifts in silhouette echoing the madness that was Aramis’s hair in the mornings. Aramis felt, rather than explicitly saw, his features rising out of every cluster of color; here and there, Porthos’s strong features joined him, grounded him, though he felt his grip on reality loosening with every piece.

He turned and saw Porthos’s face, slack with awe, and beyond it, himself standing at the studio window, shades of green turning him into part of the tree outside, and he raised a hand to his mouth. “Shit,” he whispered. He had to get out, and, turning quickly around, he saw a small iron spiral staircase at the far end of the gallery and hurried towards it, careening downwards until he emerged, breathless and relieved, out into the dirty central courtyard, narrow enough to be little more than an alley, in the center of the city block.

Athos was standing out there, smoking, and did not look surprised to see Aramis at all.

“I hate crowds,” he said quietly, not unkindly, as Aramis caught his breath. “Needed some air.”

“Sure.” Aramis straightened up, straightened his scarf, paced a little, still unnerved by the realization that he was capable of the depth of feeling that had provoked his mad dash for freedom. “’S good. All of it. Really good.”

“Thank you. Well, it’s not great,” Athos said, exhaling smoke tiredly. “I get the feeling my reputation is pulling in the numbers, but whatever helps Constance.”

“Hey,” Aramis protested halfheartedly, and Athos nearly smiled. Silence fell.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Aramis said, eventually, nettled, scratching a hand through his hair to try and hide his discomfort. “I know I’m a vain asshole, and a pushy one at that, and I should have realized I wasn’t being what you wanted or needed. You don’t need to blame yourself for not – wanting me there, fucking around in your life, okay? I’m sorry.”

He waited, but received no response, as seconds stretched into a minute. “Oh, fuck, you know I’m not good at this,” he sighed, crossing his arms angrily. “Are you going to say anything, or not?”

“I want you to know,” Athos said eventually, “that I don’t expect anything from you, for this. You’re under no obligation.”

“Wow, because that was exactly _not_ what I meant,” Aramis said heavily, unable to tamp down on his sarcasm, and his disappointment, that that had apparently been Athos’s only concern with this whole fucking deal.

“I’m a fraud,” Athos continued, slow and thoughtful, and staring at a point somewhere above Aramis’s shoulder. “Always have been. I’ve had three – exactly three – periods of true creativity in my life. A few days, a week, no more. And they’ve all come down to the madness of a _fucking_ breakdown because I couldn’t handle what life had thrown at me.”

He dropped his cigarette and ground it out beneath his heel, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and refused to look at Aramis, who for his part was completely dumbfounded at the candidness of his confession. “At least you’re not dead,” he murmured. “Or a pathological liar. That’s progress, I suppose.”

“I can come up with all sorts of lies, if it’ll make you feel better,” Aramis said weakly. He swallowed hard, and came a couple of steps closer to Athos, who looked tensed and shrunken in his clothes. “Come to think of it,” he said gently, “that makes it hurt less.”

“What, knowing that you ended up being a pawn to how this,” Athos said, tapping the side of his head, “works, or doesn’t? That’s a real improvement over me just being a jackass.”

“If it’s how you work, it’s how you work,” Aramis said sharply, and _there_ , he saw the opening, saw how he could salvage this and maybe, just maybe, get them both what they wanted.

“If we need to hurt each other for you to create, I’ll do it,” he said. Athos’s eyebrows shot skyward. “As long as we can come back to each other afterwards. If that’s how it works, that’s how it works,” he repeated; he stood still, with his hands at his sides, and waited.

The look of astonishment on Athos’s face was perhaps the most honest expression he’d ever seen from him. “You’d do that? For the sake of some mediocre paintings?”

“Don’t sell yourself short, darling, it’s very unattractive,” Aramis smirked. “Of course I’ll do it for the mediocre paintings. And the sex,” he added casually. “That always sweetens any deal – ”

He wasn’t sure which of them moved first, but he knew that moments later he had his hands tangled in Athos’s belt and was shoving them both against the alley wall, one leg slipping effortlessly between Athos’s as they proceeded to kiss the living daylights out of each other.

Porthos’s cough, which sounded behind them some time later, was only barely an efficient cockblock for the plan Aramis had had to fuck Athos right then and there. “Thank god,” Porthos rumbled behind them, and Aramis turned from the sight of Athos’s dazed eyes to see their friend half-in, half-out of the doorway, grinning like a madman. “I hate, I _hate_ to spoil the moment, dudes, but the guy from the _Times_ has arrived and Constance needs moral support.”

“Oh, hell,” Athos said grumpily. Porthos just burst out laughing and disappeared back up the stairs; Aramis put an arm around Athos’s shoulders and pulled him away from the wall, tucking him up into his shoulder.

“If you ever need a new muse, by the way,” he whispered into Athos’s ear, keeping his voice low and filthy, “I happen to know that Porthos is an _extremely_ passable lay.”

The tease was worth it, to see Athos’s eyes narrow and his breath catch as they reached the top of the stairs, to show off his lover aroused and _his_ in front of all the guests, many of whom turned to look at The Artist and catch his attention as he appeared. Which made it all the more important when Aramis leaned in again, and added: “If you break _his_ heart, I’ll kill you.”

Clarity returned to Athos’s expression, and he patted Aramis’s lower back a little too hard, managing to convey both the promise of affection and sincere exasperation. “You have my word,” he said sweetly, and, before turning away to find Constance, reached up and neatly tugged the beanie off of Aramis’s head, leaving him, hair disheveled, in front of the assembled company and right next to a gigantic portrait of his own face, against which, he knew, he was suddenly very recognizable.

“You fucker,” Aramis sighed to himself, and, straightening, gathered himself for the assault of the first curious photographer.

They left the darkened gallery shortly after midnight, having seen Porthos off home around eleven and poured an extremely happy and extremely drunk Constance and d’Artagnan into a taxi, where they had promptly started to nearly-shag in the back seat. It was a warm night, entirely suitable for walking, and as Aramis held out his arm for another cab Athos grabbed it and pulled him in close.

“Let’s take the long way home,” he said, and started to lead Aramis across the street; Aramis grinned hard, and, pulling Athos off-balance, started to drag him east towards 10th Avenue.

“If we’re going to be romantic about this we’re going to do it right,” he said, putting as much long-suffering into his tone as he could muster. Athos shook his head but stayed quiet, smiling, as Aramis tugged him up the old railway stairs and onto the High Line park, the fresh boards creaking beneath their feet as Aramis pressed Athos back into the railing high above the street, knowing that they were standing in mulched flowerbeds and that his head was framed against the Village skyline. “Alright, M’sieur _l’artiste_ ,” he said grandly. “Paint this.”

“I don’t need to,” Athos said, and pulled him in.

**FIN**

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of my idea of Athos’s final artistic style, which I hope I conveyed in some fashion, was inspired by the work of [Tim Rollins and K.O.S.](http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/tim-rollins-and-kos), specifically by a couple of pieces of theirs ([1](http://www.artnews.org/files/0000061000/0000060229.jpg/Tim_Rollins_and_K.O.S.jpg) [2](http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images.asp?url=artwork_images_651_661382_tim-rollinsandkos.jpg)) which feature imagery from _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_.
> 
> The Banksy in question is "[Battle to Survive a Broken Heart](http://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Banksy-NYC-Battle-to-Survive-a-Broken-Heart-in-Brooklyn1.jpg)." It was actually defaced by a rival graffiti artist, Omar, [soon after it was put up](http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/bansky1.jpg). Other works referenced include [Andy Warhol’s Blowjob](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frrO6A1AYbE) (NSFW) ; I’m indebted to Pamela Smith’s wonderful book _The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution_ for a few of the section-introducing quotes. The "there was a hook" line came from a typically hilarious Stephen Fry story on QI. And [this article](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/arts/design/from-hot-to-schlock-holland-cotter-tours-chelsea-galleries.html), from the _NYTimes_ ’s Holland Stotter, is a good primer on Chelsea as an art area and the sorts of things you might see around there these days. This fic is very New York-heavy, so if there’s anything that was unclear to non-residents feel free to ask!
> 
> Title from Spenser’s _Amoretti_ , Sonnet 80:
> 
> AFTER so long a race as I haue run  
> Through Faery land, which those six books compile  
> giue leaue to rest me, being halfe fordonne,  
> and gather to my selfe new breath awhile.  
> When as a steed refreshed after toyle,  
> out of my prison I will breake anew:  
> and stoutly will that second worke assoyle,  
> with strong endeuour and attention dew.  
> Till then giue leaue to me in pleasant mew,  
> to sport my muse and sing my loues sweet praise:  
> the contemplation of whose heauenly hew,  
> my spirit to an higher pitch will rayse.  
> But let her prayses yet be low and meane,  
> fit for the handmayd of the Faery Queene.
> 
> **P.S.** Apologies to everyone on my part for disappearing for so long! I am now fully into my relaxed summer swing and intend to churn out a whole lot more fic in the near future. Thank you so much for your continued kudos and comments in the meantime :-)


	4. In Trump of Fame Blaze Over All

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a little something about me: before I joined the Musketeers fandom and started writing again this January, I was on fanfic hiatus for nearly three years. Before that, I was in the footy RPF/S fandom for four years, and wrote or co-wrote over a million words of fic for it. It was kind of a big deal. So being as this is a World Cup summer, and given the whole SoccerAid miracle (Santiago and my Favorite Player Ever [took a picture together](http://38.media.tumblr.com/52c42e220364d226a0ce64a3d1be3ab8/tumblr_n6vdqakg3P1qhvrzyo1_400.png) jfc people), it was kind of inevitable that I would do this AU at some point. I’m rusty on the fandom/verse so this is quite short and impressionistic, but I hope you enjoy it!

*

 

**#1**

Porthos hates international breaks. He hates the slow dullness of them, the quick-quick slow drip of accumulated points and long-haul flights; hates not knowing where the others are, hates not being able, when Aramis is off with Chile, Athos with France, and d’Artagnan with Italy, to look up from the unsettling unfamiliarity of his foreign goalposts and see them for comfort’s sake. (The one exception to this is when he is at Wembley, because to step onto that pitch, stand on that goal line, and know that this world and this crowd is _his_ and he has _earned_ them, is the best fucking source of self-validation for a boy from Peckham in the whole wide world.)

He is a man ruled by his senses and emotions, and knows it. It takes little more than the smell of freshly-cut grass to settle him, or the puff of dirt spraying up beneath his boot from a goal kick; the cling of rubber around his knuckles makes him calm, the ritual of stripping gloves and pads and boots on and off – always in the same order, right then left, leaving the sinister for last – keeping him sane.

He is the best keeper in the league, and proves it. He is big in every way, and can spread himself so large that onrushing strikers falter and trip over their own feet; when he throws himself at the ball they go skittering and flailing over his shoulders as though over a log, and their attempts to claim a foul wither at the sight of his thunderous face. When his defenders fuck up and leave him having to deal with a penalty, he doesn’t try any mind games – not to the penalty taker’s face, anyway. Instead he just leaps up to the crossbar for a moment, hangs there, pulls himself up to a great height, and roars. The home crowd, well-used to the spectacle and loving every single fucking moment of it, roar back, and, more often than not, the ball is shanked skywards or loops tamely into his arms.

He both loves and hates being a keeper, and shows it. He likes the solitude of it, most matches, and appreciates that the captain’s armband on his right bicep gives him more input than most keepers would have; he loves being able to direct his defence, and see, from a vantage point most other players just didn’t understand, the beauty of formations playing out in front of him, the ball like a marionette master tugging bodies this way and that. Other times, though, when a game is not going well – when the ball stalls in the midfield and tactics disappear, when he is kept far too busy and comes close to losing his formidable voice, or the general scrap leaves him tense and pacing, watchful for the long ball over the top – he feels confined, stilted, as though tethered unwillingly to the line he is meant to protect.

Worst of all, though, is when, even in his capacity as captain, he can’t protect his lads from the losses, the misses, the injuries – he runs out to remonstrate with the referees, every time, making sure it is only he who speaks to the officials and that no one else incriminates themselves, but it hardly ever makes a difference. He is the length of the pitch away when d’Artagnan misses a shot or a penalty and walks away inconsolable, Aramis’s arm slung over his shoulder; he can only watch, getting angrier and angrier, when, having figured out they were set up with Athos as their central playmaker, the Red Guards show up with the express intention of kicking the living daylights out of him. Athos, never being the type to dive, hobbles on until the sixtieth minute, and Porthos finally can’t stop himself from hurtling out of the 18-yard box and bellowing into the face of the worst of them, a weasly wanker of a man named Gaudet, with Athos lying crumpled at their feet, spent.

In the ensuing melee the cards fly, yellow and red; Porthos finds himself sent off and perversely glad of it. He knows they will lose, or at the best grind out a draw with d’Artagnan and Aramis vengeful in attack, but at least he gets to accompany Athos’s stretcher off the pitch, help him walk down the tunnel when he insists his legs still work, shoo away the physios once they were in the dressing room and kneel down to strap ice packs to purpling bruises.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Athos mumbles thickly at some point, blood still dripping from his nose from the application of a well-timed elbow. Porthos resists the urge to hit him again, and just shoves a clean towel into Athos’s hand.

“’Course I did, shut up.”

Athos coughs out a laugh, and Porthos knows that, keeper or no keeper, there is nowhere else he’d rather be.

*

 

**#8**

Athos stood over the dead ball, took two long steps backwards, settled himself, and breathed in. _Two goals since my last drink_ , he thought, and closed his eyes.

He’d always been the quiet one; sometimes, commentators called him The Puppeteer. Sprung from his public school at fourteen (against the wishes of his parents, but it was his signature and if they were many other things, they weren’t the sort to go against someone’s word) by an eagle-eyed scout who didn’t disdain to watch boys who had no business playing football instead of rugby, apprenticed at sixteen, breaking into the first team at nineteen and transferring for big money at twenty had felt so easy, so natural; too easy, he knew now, having spent years adapting to English pace and roughness, the quickfire rushes and galloping runs.

He wasn’t made for dealing with change or disruption. He’d known that all along; he was built for the sly trick and the short pass, linking the defence to the final third, a quick spin and a sixth sense for knowing when and where his eager teammates will be waiting. He was the one who played the best pranks in the dressing room when others would least expect it; who silently disapproved of hazing the younger lads and whispered breath-low threats in French into the ears of anyone who dared doubt the gaffer’s decisions, who would ping a ball halfway down the training pitch straight into the back of an unsuspecting mate’s head for a lark (it was usually Aramis, because the high-pitched whine he made was always worth it).

Athos was the sort of man who would never have suspected, when Anne came into his life, that there was anything more to her than what he saw in her. He drank in moderation, but never alone; he went out, but never against club orders, and something of the long-dormant Frenchman in him made him seek out wine instead of the typical pint down the pub. She changed all that; she made him something different from the moment he met her behind the scenes at some god-awful photoshoot for the club magazine, turned him into a man who sought out limelights just so she could be seen on his arm, whose name was in the press more often for his actions off the pitch than on it. They won the league, and he brought her onto the pitch amongst all of the other wives and girlfriends and children and kissed her right in front of a camera to show them both off – to say look, look at how beautiful she is, look at how she chose me – and felt invincible.

She left him in the summer, three weeks after that trophy triumph, up and disappearing with the lion’s share of his many bank accounts. He missed most of July thanks to a combination of Scotch and the leftover sleeping pills a club doctor had once given him to help with post-match insomnia, and wobbled into the north London training ground in early August woefully unfit and generally unsound. Serge, the ancient kit-man, met him at the entrance and walked him past the gaggle of curious photographers (halfway through the transfer market, and god, he wished he could just give up his contract and move away, far away from anywhere where he had once been with her) and into the club, ushering him carefully into the manager’s office.

“’E’s here, boss,” Serge said anxiously, and Athos had been mildly surprised, even through his hangover, to realize that he had apparently missed the appointment of a new manager.

“Sit down,” the grizzled man opposite him said, with a noticeable accent, and once Athos had fallen into the offered chair and peered at the nameplate on the desk – Treville, another bloody Frog, was that a good thing? Well, not on his personal evidence – he steepled his fingers and tilted his head at Athos critically.

“Quoi?” Athos snapped eventually, feeling self-destructive. Treville had merely narrowed his eyes, and pointed to a low settee on the other side of the office.

“Get some rest. Training in two hours. Don’t come out unless you’re prepared to act sober.”

The first two weeks were hell. He drank at night, fell into stupors, sometimes slept on that damn settee, sometimes had to hire a chauffeur to get himself to the training ground in the first place because his pre-Anne tradition of taking the Tube and being quietly glad to mingle with fans who recognized him was no longer an option. Treville had Serge tail him at all times, forced him to train alone, running solitary laps on a separate training pitch from the rest of the squad, wired up and sweating hard until he had to collapse in the center circle and vomit out the poison. Every pound he lost left him feeling more and more emaciated; every meal put in front of him in the canteen brought on an attack of bloat. There were appointments with the sports scientists, meaningless streams of numbers and muscle densities and speed curves which made him desperate for escape; and every afternoon, sitting slumped across from Treville, the promise that he would not touch a ball again until he deserved it.

“Fucking _con_ ,” Athos said repeatedly as he fell down on the ridiculous sofa into sleep; behind him, Treville would audibly smirk, and keep the cabinets in which he kept all of his players’ contracts, including Athos’s, resolutely locked.

A week before the start of the season, his first session completed without a physical breakdown was rewarded with an empty pitch, unstrung goal posts and a black string bag full of balls, and just like that, Athos felt he could breathe again. It took most of a day to re-refine his aim, but he did, and did it again, and again, and again, drilling shots into the top corners, bending them over and around dummies until it was dark and he was stumbling and too exhausted to be nettled at the sight of Treville watching him from the lit windows of his office.

It wasn’t easy after that, but it was better, and he found it far less difficult than he had anticipated to re-integrate himself into the team, to slip seamlessly into the routine of group five-a-sides and running drills, sharing colored bibs and shared water bottles, banter and commiserations (“They run fucking _classes_ for girls who want to be WAGs, mate, you’re hardly the first”) from the old hands keeping him grounded while the younger lads, for whatever reason, seemed to hold him in some sort of terrified awe.

As the season began, Treville told him that he would be fined for every occasion he arrived at the club grounds drunk or hungover. The rule cost him a lot of money, in those first few months, but it helped; it helped to know that he could pay it, and that even though he had erred, Treville knew that he appreciated the concern; it helped to program new numbers into his rarely-used phone, and know that Porthos or Aramis, or even the youngest and cheekiest of them, d’Artagnan, who took down Athos’s balls out of the air better than anyone with a breathless turn of pace in the box, could and would call him and chatter to him just to hear the sound of their own voices, and keep him awake.

He stood still, waiting for the stadium to hush, and opened his eyes. Pulling himself back, taking that short run, feeling the shock of the impact through the top of his foot and watching the ball sail into the upper right-hand corner of the net over the craning heads of the defenders, was the easy part; the adventure came in having the fortitude to wheel away on his own instead of greeting his onrushing teammates, to race like a mad thing over to the bench, where Treville was waiting with open outstretched arms to embrace him, grab him by the chin and shake him gleefully.

“Three,” Athos shouted over the din of the crowd, and Treville nodded, and that, as the others finally reached them and piled onto his shoulders, was enough.

*

 

**#9**

d'Artagnan was uncharacteristically nervous when he first moved to London. It was a feeling which, he was sure, would fade with time, and quickly at that; it was hard not to feel confident in your abilities, after all, when you were twenty-one and cost twenty-eight million, and had perfected the best post-goal slide celebration this side of the Rhine.

Still, on his first day, sitting gingerly on a hallowed dressing-room bench which he had spent much of his youth looking at on the television and in champagne-splattered photographs in the tabloids come every other May, it was hard not to feel overwhelmed. He was quick and sprightly, had good instincts with the ball at his feet, and, most importantly, was always willing to work hard, especially in such company as Athos de la Fère and Aramis d’Herblay, whom he knew he would be partnering with every chance he could get on the field of play – especially with Aramis, who came with a feral grin and sparkling eyes which were currently looking at d’Artagnan as though he was a highly attractive piece of fresh meat, and oh, _hell_. It was only his first day, and already d’Artagnan wanted, in some small way, to run and hide.

He was extremely grateful, therefore, when all attention was taken off of him as the New Boy as a completely fucking gorgeous woman walked into the dressing room, scanty in a sports bra, shorts and bare feet and sweat visible along the faint lines of her abs, and wolf-whistles burst out of every corner of the room.

“Desperate as ever, I see,” she drawled, and Porthos burst out laughing. “Pony up, lads. A round for the girls at the pub?”

 _She_ turned out to be Constance, the captain and stalwart centre-back of the club’s women’s squad, and every bit as feisty in word and deed as she was in appearance. Her regular trips to the dressing room brought a touch of class into everyday proceedings, and her whip-rounds for the ladies (many of whom held second jobs, the biggest exception being Ninon, who spent a lot of time bickering with Athos in rapid-fire French about the merits of one year’s wine crop over another’s) soon led to d’Artagnan hanging around their training sessions, delighting in the banter which was every bit as fierce as the men’s, and wondering why the hell she and the others – Agnes, Alice, Anne, and Flea, who sometimes trained with Porthos and may even have been a better goalkeeper than he was, were no shrinking violets either, just for a start – put up with the inequity.

“You want to take on the League for us, then?” was all Constance said, tying her glorious hair up in a messy bun before she shooed d’Artagnan away from the gaggle of women as they trooped inside to wash up. “Fair does, mate; I’d appreciate it, but until we get more money and a TV deal we’re stuck. Oh, and the sort of grassroots the men get, when even that is failing. Good luck with that.”

He spent months wondering whether the stereotype of female football players all being – well, you know, most comfortable in each other’s company – was true before he finally plucked up the courage to ask Constance out for drinks on their own rather than with the others, and got everything that he had wanted and bargained for and more.

“It’s perfectly simple,” Constance yawned later back at his flat, snuggled into the crook of d’Artagnan’s arm under the sheets. “I’m married – oh, sorry, I hope that’s alright – Ninon swings both ways and she and Athos are definitely fucking, Porthos loves Flea like a sister which is lucky because she’s busy seducing her way through everyone and is really bloody good at it, Agnes had to take a long break to have her kid and doesn’t date, and Alice keeps to herself. And I’m not saying any of that again because you’re you and there’s probably a pap outside, so just shut up and kiss me, will you?”

He did, and got a hell of a lot of stick at the training ground for the lovebite on his neck the next morning, but it was worth it for knowing what he knew and what he had, and for the look on Athos’s face across the room, somewhere between fondness and, guessing what d’Artagnan had found out about him, embarrassed and unashamed pride.

d’Artagnan touched a finger to the side of his nose, and winked; Athos nodded, and both turned back to the rhythm of their days.

*

 

**#10**

Halfway through the season, Aramis realizes that d’Artagnan may be threatening his record run of collecting the end-of-season Golden Boot, and he is not happy about it at all.

It’s not that he begrudges the boy’s talent (not really – well, perhaps), but he does resent the implication that he can be replaced in anything, whether personal or professional. He has carved out an extremely comfortable and daring reputation for himself; top scorer in the league for a few seasons with the promise of more to come, the perfect number 10 hovering behind the main striker, who scores free kicks for fun when Athos doesn’t get to the ball before him and has perfected the quick triangular pass which allows him to run in behind the defense and cross inwards or power his own way through all the way to the end, chipping over the opposing keeper and, always and carefully, making it look easy. He is happy to be the one interviewed at the end of matches, taking it as an opportunity both to spare his teammates the duty and to consciously preen and luxuriate; he is delighted to find out he has a special fanclub of his own online with mostly female and a few wistful male members. He clubs in Soho every week at a minimum, and still comes in to training fresh; he knows his body inside and out, knows its capabilities, and puts it to good use every chance he can get.

Aramis is also, somewhat strangely, the man among all of them least affected when something goes wrong for the club, and the most willing to find a way to lift the others up. It is not that he feels less deeply than the others when they go out of the Champions League in the quarters, badly, and d’Artagnan hides his face in Athos’s shirt to hide his tears as the older player coaxes him off the field, Porthos sits quietly devastated on his haunches in the goal, and Treville stands tight-lipped and proud in front of the tunnel, waiting to take his lads home; it is just that he finds himself able, most of the time, to push his own urge to give up to one side, to forget that this hurts, and remind himself that this, this moment, Porthos silent and hunch-shouldered on the team bus in the dead of night: this is what is important, now.

It’s easy, with Porthos. Both of them are willing, for the thrill of it, to risk hurried, urgent moments in the backseat of one of their cars in the club parking lot, quick both so they don’t have to think about it too hard and because deep down, neither of them know what they would do were they to be discovered. Athos is a bit more of a mystery at first, and Aramis has no real desire to intrude on whatever process Athos has constructed for himself to Not Be Fucked Up, but when he eventually figures out that all Athos needs is not to be the one who makes the first move, he, too, is easy to comfort after a bad game, when Aramis slips into his shower stall, finds him slick-haired and slumped against the tile walls, slowly presses flush against him, and Athos moans into his mouth.

He is startled by how well, in fact, his new pleasures succeed. It is Athos, in fact, who starts the game, secretly wicked as he is, putting more force behind his grasping Aramis after he scores than is strictly necessary, and whispering the promise of filthy rewards into his ear in the scrum. Aramis gives as good as he gets, and when Porthos makes his next magnificent save, tipping a dipping shot just over the crossbar at full stretch with the tips of his fingers, he runs halfway down the pitch to smack a kiss onto his forehead and include him in the charade. When they win the league, in May, and Aramis sees for the first time how d’Artagnan clings to Athos in that too-stimulating hour on the pitch, covered with ribbons and confetti and breathlessly holding the cup aloft, he thinks that in the fall, when they all come back from holidays tanned and relaxed and raring to go again, he will include him too.

It is not quite to be, however, because in August they go on a pre-season tour of France and, on a blistering-hot evening in the southeast, Aramis comes face to face with a former friend from his days playing in Spain and it doesn’t end well. Marsac crunches into him with a wholly illegal tackle as he’s chasing the ball into the box; d’Artagnan scurries to Aramis’s side, looks down at his ankle, instantly pales, and Aramis can hear him, through the delirious haze that has descended on his vision, being sick. Athos and Porthos are holding his hands, he’s turning their fingers white; he wakes up some time later in hospital, his leg swathed in plaster from his toes to his knee, and with Athos slumbering uncomfortably in a chair across the room, it is Porthos who reaches over and puts a hand over Aramis’s, keeping him still.

“Hush now, mate,” Porthos says, smiling, only just, with relief. “You got yourself a dangler,” he continues, and Aramis is suddenly glad that he passed out, so he didn’t have to see his foot limp and hanging at an impossible angle, shattered.

“How long?” he croaks.

“Four months, they reckon,” Porthos says, getting up and settling himself on the bed at Aramis’s side. “Treville’s drawing up a new contract for you right now. You’ll be back before y’know it.”

Whether it’s the painkillers or the gesture, Aramis isn’t sure, but he finds himself feeling unexpectedly and suddenly fragile, unsure whether he will break or melt. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Porthos rumbles, and squeezes Aramis’s hand. “We’ll take care of _you_ , this time.”

He leans down and presses a firmly gentle kiss to Aramis’s lips, and as he slides back into sleep, Aramis promises himself that when he next wakes up, he will draw up a list of all the _highly_ interesting things he plans to indulge in while bedridden. A lot can be done in four months.

**FIN**

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Spenser’s Amoretti, Sonnet 29 (made me think of the cagey game of insults and praise in the post-match interviews, heh):
> 
> SEE! how the stubborne damzell doth depraue  
> my simple meaning with disdaynfull scorne:  
> and by the bay which I vnto her gaue,  
> accoumpts my selfe her captiue quite forlorne.  
> The bay (quoth she) is of the victours borne,  
> yielded them by the vanquisht as theyr meeds,  
> and they therewith doe poetes heads adorne,  
> to sing the glory of their famous deedes.  
> But sith she will the conquest challeng needs  
> let her accept me as her faithfull thrall,  
> that her great triumph which my skill exceeds,  
> I may in trump of fame blaze ouer all.  
> Then would I decke her head with glorious bayes,  
> and fill the world with her victorious prayse.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Lodestar of My Life [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1837459) by [RevolutionaryJo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RevolutionaryJo/pseuds/RevolutionaryJo)




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